May 1/05: What Is a Fair Price?

Anyone who thinks porn consumers don't care about price, that they're just driven by their uncontrollable biological urges, just has to look at the success of VideoBox. Sure it's a great place to download movies, but if you want to know why it's been the best-selling site around here for over a year you just have to look at the price: $9.95 a month. Porn shoppers can smell a bargain, and they don't come any sweeter than that.

But obviously that kind of pricing is the exception and not the rule. For whatever reason it looks like the average monthly rate for a porn paysite has pretty much stabilized, for the moment, somewhere between $20-$30 a month (unfortunately, the trend is upward). Solo amateur sites are often at the low end of this scale, larger sites and multiple-site networks at the upper end. But there are some weird anomalies that seem to keep cropping up:

(1) The more extreme the action, the more you can expect to pay. I don't know if it really costs any more to produce this stuff, but I've found that a lot of the more kinky fetish sites charge a premium, often taking them up over the magical $30 limit. Examples include the Meat Members network, The English Dungeon and even the solo amateur site Extreme Holly. This strikes me as a kink tax, and I'm not sure it's fair. However the law of supply and demand does suggest that price goes up when there isn't as much to be had, so maybe it has some justification.

(2) Some pornstars just think they're worth more. Of course I'm mainly thinking of Jenna Jameson's ClubJenna here, but there are a few others as well. They aren't worth the premium. Their sites aren't any better (and can often be worse) than a lot of cheaper amateurs. You're paying for a name.

(3) Watch out for the Europeans! A Euro is worth a lot more than a dollar, and the exchange can really bump a site's cost up quite a bit. 

(4) Cheap trials. I remember a forum discussion a few years ago where it was being argued that all trials are rip-offs. This isn't true. Some trial memberships are the real deal: offering super-cheap access to all of a site's content for a limited amount of time. The two things you have to watch out for are: (a) canceling your membership before the end of the trial so it doesn't renew (sometimes at a premium rate); and (b) the "limited trial" scams where a trial rate only lets you download a handful of poor quality videos. This latter is probably the worst new development I've seen in years. It's obviously a trap for the unwary, with the "unwary" being anyone who doesn't research the site thoroughly (and by that I mean reading all of the available reviews--because a lot of the time an individual review will miss it, especially if the reviewer has been provided with a full membership pass). Nothing is said on the site tour or Join page about getting limited access. It should be against the law.

As I've said before, most Internet porn is still a good deal. Compare even $30 a month to the cost of magazines and DVDs. With a lot of the best sites coming out with daily updates, and hosting archives going back several years, a buck a day is downright cheap. This isn't to say there aren't any scams out there, because there are, but if you know what it is you like and you do your research you shouldn't have any trouble finding value for your porn dollar.

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