The aesthetics aren't great, but this is because it doesn't matter. Users are otherwise concerned by other things.
In my opinion - the only "startup" in the adult industry doing anything really original is myfreecams.
The media coverage will help them, but I cant see how this is doing anything original or new.
Can you tell us a bit about what they're doing?
The idea is simple: you can watch girls on cam for free. But to talk to them you have to buy tokens, you tip girls you like and so on. So it's essentially modeled a bit like a strip club but on a much grander scale.
That must have been 15 years ago. Most of the industry runs on shitty PHP/Perl scripts running on cPanel powered dedicated/shared servers. See http://www.gfy.com (Now Hiring, Buy and Sell and Business services forums - NSFW)
Most of the stuff people see is just ground level grunts making cheap nasty affiliate sites.
From wikipedia:
Manwin is the owner of many major pornographic web 2.0 websites including YouPorn, Pornhub, Tube8, XTube, ExtremeTube, JuicyBoys, Webcams, Mydirtyhobby, KeezMovies and SpankWire which between them generate some 16 billion visitors per month and consequently are believed to be among the most popular websites on the planet. Manwin also owns and operates a number of pornographic content brands such as Brazzers, Digital Playground, Mofos, MyDirtyHobby and Twistys.
So they control half (or more) of the biggest money maker on the internet. A far better investment than Instagram (with it's ridiculous $1 billion) ever was.
OP - not trying to discredit you or be rude so I hope my comments don't come across that way. I'm just talking about the actual comment form the LSE.
edit: I've become accustomed to the horizontal scrolling in Netflix's interface, but Netflix also has (I assume) a lot of talented UI/UX people on staff, which this site obviously lacks.
What coverage? This submission itself seems to be the only time the site has been mentioned on HN.
I also think there are some warning bells in the Techcrunch article:
>"Internet porn sites are still shameful artifacts of a decade past — from when the Internet was a collection of websites featuring low-resolution images and oversized banner ads"
You should always be very careful when labelling a sophisticated and fast-moving industry as out-dated as the accusation can come straight back at you. The current sites could be better designed but frankly they are not bad and represent huge technical feats, streaming massive amounts of video to huge numbers of people. Since what they give out is free and they've been going for as long as YouTube I think it's fair to conclude that they're monetising that content effectively via advertising.
I'd be very surprised if this is an industry which can be won by design improvements. I think there are largely two types of company 1) the free sites who generate most of their cash from lead gen and advertising 2) the subscription sites who create content that's sufficiently high quality or niche that people will pay for it. The latter sites are the revenue stream for the former.
Paintbottle looks to me like it's going to catch itself in between these two models. I would guess it's going to struggle as a free site (since it doesn't have any ads) and will also struggle as a paid site because it's not sufficiently niche and its funding expectations may preclude the types of revenues it could viably make. The sooner it figures out which one it actually is the more likely it is to succeed.
For who? They aren't designed to keep users happy (as the users generally are already ... happy). They are designed to make money, by getting banner clicks / affiliate payements / promotion payments / whatever.
I'd expect the better tube sites to have a lower average time on site if you know what I mean...
I would expect that a good user experience would be reflected in a lower median time spent on the site though, but my knowledge of people's porn habits is admittedly limited.
Title could be renamed "High-stakes poker players crowdfunding next generation porn site"
I'm not sure about this one. The design seems great if you don't mind browsing, but I had a difficult time sticking with specific macro- and micro- categories.
>> Half of the Internet-connected populous watches porn.
While this might be true, I've always thought this was a tad misleading. While half of all internet users watching a 3 minute video for giggles is one thing, this stat seems to suggest that 50% of all people go the internet to rub one off and do it everyday. This is sort of like saying "50% of all Americans saw Titanic."* This suggests that we all enjoyed it, willingly watched it, and didn't walk out half way through, none of which is true.
* I don't know the real statistic.
I fear it's the latter. The numbers sure add up, if you ever see traffic stats from a large ISP.
Youporn uses a cluster of Redis slaves to handle over 300k queries per second, according to https://groups.google.com/forum/m/?fromgroups#!topic/nosql-d...
As for content - my 2 cents is that society we need better actors and directors in this area. Just look at sex scenes in Weeds, Black Swan, or Shame - much less explicit skin compared to porn, but a lot sexier nonetheless. Frankly I am surprised that content is not better, with so much demand and money in the business.
Most successful sites use tags for folks to find what they want. And instead of a ribbon of "curated" links (ie: the content they're getting paid to show) they show all the matching screen caps tiled for your perusal (see Beeg.com for a NSFW example.)
Also, content. Being told "You've ran out of videos, come back tomorrow" is a recipe for failure. It might not be a problem once there's three months worth of content to wade through, but the site seemed small and not the "one-stop shop" that most users are looking for.
People go to porn sites ostensibly for the content. So long as the page is remotely usable (even if it looks like it was made back in the 20th century) people will use it. Just like with craigslist. Unless the site had more content or a lower price point (not sure how you beat free on the price point) it's not clear if they'll achieve even a modicum of success
Totally 21st century like Netflix and Hulu. :/
One of the more curious UI bit is the way the videos pulse and flicker as you scan thru the available videos. Caught my eye more than a few times as I wrote this post.
Just a handful of vanilla C and B quality vids.
