MONTREAL – When the company now known as BrainGunk first launched its flagship adult tube site SmutNucleus in 2008, the site’s index sported a provocative and prescient tagline: “Under Construction.”

While the original slogan was quickly disposed of, the tube’s second motto stuck like dry semen on a hastily wadded-up handkerchief: “Never Pay for Porn Again.”

Discontent swirled among adult industry insiders due to SmutNucleus’s adoption of the “user-generated-content” business model: a largely Filipino user-base composed of destitute young men who still had index fingers and a willingness to take orders “generated content” by downloading it from competing adult websites and then uploading it to SmutNucleus at the behest of mysterious managers with Canadian IP addresses.

Consequently, the company behind the site mostly kept silent in the site’s early days, knowing their growing success was not necessarily appreciated by the rest of the porn industry.

“People are so funny in their resistance to and fear of technological change and the new business models such change enables,” said Khaled “Bobo” Wasem, who co-founded the company with a friend from college, Jean-Luc Pierna. “All we did was use the new technologies available to us to perpetrate one of the most expansive series of knowing, willful, intentional copyright infringements in human history, and everybody in porn started acted like we were criminals or something. So childish.”

As porn surfers increasingly flocked to SmutNucleus and the glut of imitators and wannabes it inspired, other entrepreneurs in the adult industry knew exactly how to respond: endless bitching, whining and reminiscing about “the good old days.”

“Sure, if one of us had stopped talking about how someone should sue their asses and filed suit against these pricks back in 2008 before they got their legal shit together and did stuff like register a DMCA agent with the copyright office, we could have taken them down easier than a walker-dependent octogenarian in the midst of a vertigo attack,” said “Copper” Matt Prosser, owner of the now-defunct CopperCoinage affiliate program. “But at the time, it made a lot more sense to just rip them a new one on the message boards on a daily basis and commiserate with other studios and producers than to take any kind of legal action. Lawsuits are expensive. We all had mouths to feed, gold-diggers to placate and six-acre warehouses full of sports cars to support, after all.”

Whatever one might think of BrainGunk’s history or business model, this week the company announced a new service which makes some observers wonder if the BrainGunk has hit the ceiling of the ad-driven revenue model for free porn sites: SmutNucleus Plus.

The new “Plus” service offers SmutNucleus users access to more than 100,000 high-definition adult videos for $10 a month, leading unoriginal journalistic hacks across the globe to declare the service the “Netflix of Porn,” making it the 543^rd adult streaming service to be so dubbed by the mainstream media.

While the current team at BrainGunk appears confident a significant percentage of its users will opt to pay a small price for improved video quality, some market observers and chronic masturbators aren’t so sure.

“I’m 22 years old, I’ve been watching porn every day for years and I’ve never once paid a single penny for any of it,” said Seth Valchevich, a senior studying mechanical engineering at the Idaho Institute of Technology, who asked not to be identified but then behaved like an entitled, arrogant little shit, so we’re using his name anyway. “It’s not like SmutNucleus is the only game in town, after all. Free porn is everywhere online.

“To pay for porn at this point, you have to be gullible, dumb and honest—and in my experience, people who meet all three criteria have a really hard time accurately entering credit card information into online signup forms,” he added.

The little snot from Idaho isn’t the only one who’s skeptical of the prospects for SmutNucleus Plus. Loud, obnoxious, buzzword-spouting technology analyst Todd P. Buckwalter predicts SmutNucleus Plus will be “a spectacular brand-extension failure of epic, Ford Edsel-like proportions.”

“Dropping its customer-centricity levels by moving away from a native advertising-supported model threatens to interrupt the ongoing brand storytelling that has lifted SmutNucleus to the position of being a market disruptor, possibly plunging the site into a downward spiral from which no amount of actionable analytics or advertainment can possible resuscitate its brand identity,” Buckwalter said. “For many years, people have been saying ‘Content is King’—but these days free content is God, or at the very least Merlin crossed with Gandalf. Even kings don’t fuck with wizards. It’s one of the seven bedrock rules of web marketing traditionally relied upon by highly successful paid consultants.”