Definition and meaning of Paysite

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A paysite, in pornography jargon, is a website that charges money to become a member and view its content,^[1] and often produces original adult content. They can be contrasted with "free-sites", which do not charge a membership fee.^[2] Most paysites offer "free tours" which allow non-members to view a limited number of short trailers.^[3] The vast majority of paysite memberships are bought by men.^[4] Some of the earliest paysites began by scanning images from pornographic magazines.^[5] The number of sites then grew until the market was saturated, and now many thousands of sites catering to every legal pornographic niche.^[5]

Because there is free porn available on the internet (e.g. thumbnail gallery post and streaming video sites, not to mention piracy), and some individuals cannot afford to or do not wish to purchase paysite memberships, some consumers of pornography view only free pornography. However, paysites are often one of the main originators of new content; they're one way an administrator can pay for the bandwidth costs and they're one of the most conspicuous ways in the industry to try to turn a profit. Theoretically, the more revenue a site takes in, the higher quality content it can produce.

Payment methods include credit card and/or checking account billing. Bills routinely appear on statements as transactions under the name of a billing entity with a neutral-sounding company name (ostensibly for discretionary reasons) and may not be readily recognized as paysite billing transactions upon casual perusal of bank statements.

Most paysites prevent unauthorized access to their members area by means of a username and password.^[1]

A problem that paysites have is copyright protection, even with well-secured sites: there are cases of so-called "site rips", i.e. sites are either hacked, or subscribers redistributed content from a member's area without authorization; there have thus been sightings of original content on other TGP sites or entire site rip archives on file sharing networks. Some sites even sell site rips of paysites, e.g. SiteRipKing.^[6] Administrators may try to counter these problems by employing digital rights management technologies.

Because members must confirm some details of their identity when they make their payment, a touted advantage of paysites is the potential to keep minors from the viewing of their content, which, in several jurisdictions, including the United States, is illegal. The issue of how to protect these internet audiences from pornographic material deemed harmful to them has been widely debated in the U.S. in light of the 1998 federal Child Online Protection Act.

Many paysites attract potential paying customers by providing a portion of their content for free via free hosted galleries (FHGs),^[7] and use an affiliate program to drive new traffic to those FHGs.^[8] The percentage of unique visitors to FHGs who become paying members is known as the conversion ratio.

  Notes

  References

• Williams, Codry (2007). Sex Sells: the Biggest Money Making Secret on the World Wide Web. Lulu.com. ISBN 1-4116-9965-3. http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=3R8XkPgoYg8C. 

  External links

• "The Naked Truth: Stiff competition. Deadbeat customers. Backend hell. Welcome to the real world of Internet porn.". Wired.com. 2002-02. http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/10.02/sex.html.