CONTENT TRENDS

Question: Who steals your content? Answer: Most of your members. It’s simple math, really. If you run an image or video-driven website and have downloadable files, take a look at your download bandwidth and ask yourself if you’re really just giving away material that you paid decent money for.

Sooner or later, each and every one of your members will ‘steal’ your content.CONTENT TRENDS

Question: Who steals your content? Answer: Most of your members. It’s simple math, really. If you run an image or video-driven website and have downloadable files, take a look at your download bandwidth and ask yourself if you’re really just giving away material that you paid decent money for.

Sooner or later, each and every one of your members will ‘steal’ your content. For the vast majority of users, it’s simply a case of, “Hey, she’s nice, wouldn’t mind that shot.” Then there are the guys who come along, sign up for your shortest term membership and proceed to rip off as many images as they can, usually with the intention of putting their own cheap, AVS-driven website up. If we’re to believe the recent ruling in the Perfect 10 vs. Cybernet Ventures, Inc. case, then all of that is about to change. Then the world will become a brighter and shinier place for us all.

Well, don’t believe the hype. Yes, Adult Check has rightly taken immediate action, but it’s indicative of the state of our business that things should have gone this far already. I know most webmasters don’t have a problem with their images appearing on free ‘fan’ sites, since often times that’ll drive traffic in. And let’s face it, the web is staggering under the load of TGP sites, which are little more than free images lobbed at the public in a traffic management exercise. Just by doing that, we’re asking for trouble.

But when some wise guy decides that it’s easier to pull images from someone else’s site, slap them up and charge people admission for them, then it’s time to take action. The Perfect 10 case should never have happened. This issue should have been dealt with about five years ago by the industry’s major players. As it is, webmasters have sat on their hands and left both photographers and magazine publishers to fire off the ‘cease and desist’ orders.

Most big companies have a system in place to write off losses, be it staff stealing office supplies or bad debts from clients. Most webmasters have no such system in place, and suffer for it in the long run. The Perfect 10 case has proven that action is possible, and while they are no doubt reviled by the amateur webmasters who stole their images, don’t kid yourself into thinking that the problem will now go away.

Protecting your content should be no different than protecting your code. How would you feel if another webmaster came along and reproduced your site in its entirety, with only name and image changes? Pretty pissed I would think, particularly if you’d spent months with web designers trying to get the site ‘just so’. There are plenty of security measures in place to protect your content, but then there are also plenty of hackers out there itching to try their hands against the latest protection software. It’s a Catch-22. You can embed your images so that members can’t download them to their local disks, but then you run the risk of having your members complain that they can’t download your images. Or you can take the attitude that there’s nothing you can do about the situation and just sit back and watch your content walk out while you try and source new material. Just remember that when you sign your next content check.

But there is another way. It sounds crazy, but the bigger the site, the less danger there is of losing it all to pirates.

Think about it.

If you’re presented with a site that contains thousands and thousands of images, the prospect of downloading them all isn’t going to be appealing. Compare that with a smaller site, where there are fewer images, and it’s easy to see who’s going to lose out in the long run. It’s like being offered a slice of pizza, or being given an entire menu to choose from; you can’t see the wood for the trees. Or the pepperoni, if you like. The bigger your site is, the larger your insurance policy against theft. Your images are all insuring each other, because possible piracy affects you less. Perhaps that’s why the bigger outfits haven’t bothered to pursue AVS pirates in the past.

A bigger stockpile of images also means happy members, because they’re less likely to get bored if you’re constantly updating your site with new material. Once you’ve archived the old stuff, you can always spin it off into another niche site or offer ‘classic’ galleries to members a few months down the line. Adult images only date if the clothes and hairstyles change, so be aware of that when you buy material, too.

Of course, this presupposes that you have the money to invest in content, but since it’s the bread and butter of most adult sites, you should already have budgeted for it anyway. Niche sites run a greater risk, thanks to the unusual nature of their content. Again, providing more for members to feast their eyes on is often a simple way of maintaining both membership levels and security.

Ultimately, content pirates will be caught, either by their service providers, the law, the people they stole the original images from or their own greed. And if someone questions where their model release forms are… well…

I know of a number of adult photographers with websites who used to watermark their images and then run spider programs on the web to search them out. They ended up spending so much time issuing cease and desist letters that it was cutting into their ‘normal’ work. In the end, they stopped bothering.

A certain amount of theft is to be expected in any business, but not welcomed or ignored. It’s naive in the extreme to believe that we can strop piracy in its tracks when even Microsoft can’t manage it. In the same way that Microsoft has saturated the market to drown out pirates, we need to look at doing the same with content so that pirates are spoiled for choice and our losses are subsequently minimised.

Cool Piranha Content work with adult photographers from all over Europe, representing them as an agency to ensure they always have the latest adult images. Their photographers’ work has been seen in adult magazines ranging from Hustler, High Society and Club in the USA to Mayfair, Men Only, Knave and Fiesta in the UK. Uniquely, Cool Piranha Content seek out adult industry photographers and sell their latest images for them, rather than buy rights to old stock. Their niche content is therefore exclusive and has never been seen on the Internet. For more information, please contact support@coolpiranha.com