The State of Online Adult Entertainment
August 6, 2006

I remember online porn well in the late 90's, early 2000's. "Scam" would be a word that jumps to mind. I joined a few sites back then, and I was almost universally disappointed in the quality and quantity of content. I often found cancelling my membership to be a royal pain in the ass, and I was besieged by spam from a few of the sites I joined. And worst of all, one site kept billing me despite my cancelling by email and numerous phone calls - and I ended up just cancelling my card to get them to stop.

Fortunately, a lot has changed since then, and those stories are now the exception rather than the norm. Online porn has become big business and has largely rid itself of those major problems to stay in business. Two major things happened to cause this. First, one of the biggest online adult companies was sued by the FTC in 2001 for overbilling customers. Their business was temporarily shut down and they lost millions. According to the FTC they had revenues of $6 Million a month!!!  This scared the other owners of adult sites, and the common practice of overbilling customers was reduced dramatically. Then, VISA stepped in, and created a whole bunch of new rules for the companies who process credit card transactions for adult sites. VISA forced sites to have cancel links prominently listed in their members areas to make it easier for members to cancel. And they established a chargeback ratio that sites had to stay under or risk losing their ability to process VISA transactions. That meant sites had to reduce their chargebacks (when a customer calls their credit card company to demand their money back). And chargebacks usually occur when their is fraudulent billing, or the content is not what is advertised, or there is inadequate or low quality content. Within months, the quality of adult sites went way up.

Additionally, more adult sites companies have sprung up, and competition has become fierce. In the old days, when there were only a few major players, sites didn't have to be that great. Now, pay sites not only have to compete with each other, they have to compete with all the free stuff out there, so they have to offer way more than you can get for free in order to keep members. This has resulted in some truly excellent adult sites than you can feel reasonably safe joining, confident that you won't be overbilled. For this site, I stick with most of the major players whose sites I believe it is safe to join on this review site. I don't review too many of the fringe sites that I am not confident in. And if I find any site that tries to defraud me, I will note it emphatically in the site review.

Still, the one "scam" type thing that does still exist is the limited access trial membership. I only call it a "scam" because most of the time they do NOT mention before you buy it that the trial is not full access. That fact is buried deep in the "Terms & Conditions" that almost no one reads. I think trial memberships are a good thing - they let you see the members area for a few bucks - but I really think the sites should indicate clearly in advance that the trial is not full access. Especially because the renewal rate for the trials is routinely way more than the monthly membership. Often, a $5 trial will renew at $35 or even $40, when the regular monthly membership is only $25 or $30.  In general, I avoid trials as they are so rarely full access.

My biggest recommendation is that you always record the information you get after signing up, like your username, password, and member ID. I just keep them in an Excel spreadsheet so I always know where to find them. You will need these to look up your membership if you want to cancel. You will most likely get a confirmation email with all that information, but I know a lot of you use fake emails to avoid getting spam, so don't forget to record that info.

I have found that many sites today deliver an excellent amount and quality of content for your dollar. Sites like Huge Mpegs and VideosZ let you download a ridiculous amount of porn DVD's for under $30. Honestly, that is an incredible value. I know as a reviewer I should bitch about sites, but how can you bitch about being able to download $1000's in DVD's for $30?

Another great development is that adult site companies have recently started bundling all of their sites into a "pass" or "network", so you buy one membership, and you get everything in all their sites. For networks like All Sites Access and BrainPass, that totals over 1000 videos, and the "pass" usually costs the same as the membership to any ONE of their sites.

As someone lucky enough to have a blazing fast cable modem (Comcast), my main criticism of many sites is that they are only just starting to make movies in really high resolutions. I love videos that look clear and crisp at full screen (1500-2000k/sec), and those are just starting to appear on some sites.

Overall, if you stick with the major players, you can get a huge amount of content today and be reasonably confident your email and credit card will be safe, too.