The problem with this site is tastes in porn vary widely. It's not a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all box. Some people are like Asians, some people like Milfs. Some people like Asian Milfs. Some people like Asian Milf massage videos where the dude is blonde and has tattoos.
Most successful sites use tags for folks to find what they want. And instead of a ribbon of "curated" links (ie: the content they're getting paid to show) they show all the matching screen caps tiled for your perusal (see Beeg.com for a NSFW example.)
Also, content. Being told "You've ran out of videos, come back tomorrow" is a recipe for failure. It might not be a problem once there's three months worth of content to wade through, but the site seemed small and not the "one-stop shop" that most users are looking for.
I predict tough times for these guys. I remember when Zivity launched as the last "Venture Capital funded porn startup". Shortly afterwards the team dissolved, they gave back back most of the funding because they agreed with the investors that it was never going to be big and the shoestring team that remained reinvented the site as (as far as I can see) a niche, subscription site.
I also think there are some warning bells in the Techcrunch article:
>"Internet porn sites are still shameful artifacts of a decade past — from when the Internet was a collection of websites featuring low-resolution images and oversized banner ads"
You should always be very careful when labelling a sophisticated and fast-moving industry as out-dated as the accusation can come straight back at you. The current sites could be better designed but frankly they are not bad and represent huge technical feats, streaming massive amounts of video to huge numbers of people. Since what they give out is free and they've been going for as long as YouTube I think it's fair to conclude that they're monetising that content effectively via advertising.
I'd be very surprised if this is an industry which can be won by design improvements. I think there are largely two types of company 1) the free sites who generate most of their cash from lead gen and advertising 2) the subscription sites who create content that's sufficiently high quality or niche that people will pay for it. The latter sites are the revenue stream for the former.
Paintbottle looks to me like it's going to catch itself in between these two models. I would guess it's going to struggle as a free site (since it doesn't have any ads) and will also struggle as a paid site because it's not sufficiently niche and its funding expectations may preclude the types of revenues it could viably make. The sooner it figures out which one it actually is the more likely it is to succeed.
For who? They aren't designed to keep users happy (as the users generally are already ... happy). They are designed to make money, by getting banner clicks / affiliate payements / promotion payments / whatever.
Every service used by people can benefit from making their users happy to use it, and providing features that better enable the users' end goals. Regardless of how they generate revenue.
>Every service used by people can benefit from making their users happy to use it, and providing features that better enable the users' end goals. Regardless of how they generate revenue.
The point the parent tries to make is it's not "regardless" if the two objectives (making users happy - generate revenue) clash.
Interesting read: "However, the source of our funding is much more interesting: We are funded exclusively by the best high-stakes heads-up poker players in the world. Several of them grouped together and invested in Paint Bottle. This is their first investment in a startup. We met them through Craig, who opened their Canadian bank accounts when Black Friday happened to poker, resulting in a mini-exodus in which many top players moved to Montreal.”
Title could be renamed "High-stakes poker players crowdfunding next generation porn site"
A few months ago, we managed to get a former Lead Software Engineer of Manwin (YouPorn & Co) to give a talk at a Paris Hackers meetup. If I remember well, he told us that the amount of their funding has never been matched by a company covered on Techcrunch.
Manwin is the owner of many major pornographic web 2.0 websites including YouPorn, Pornhub, Tube8, XTube, ExtremeTube, JuicyBoys, Webcams, Mydirtyhobby, KeezMovies and SpankWire which between them generate some 16 billion visitors per month and consequently are believed to be among the most popular websites on the planet. Manwin also owns and operates a number of pornographic content brands such as Brazzers, Digital Playground, Mofos, MyDirtyHobby and Twistys.
So they control half (or more) of the biggest money maker on the internet. A far better investment than Instagram (with it's ridiculous $1 billion) ever was.
People often have a hard time getting the terminology right. 16 billion visitors is synonymous with 16 billion uniques, so not possible - by quite some way.
If you load the site, then click a few links (say 4 pages in total), then close your tab/window, then load the site and click a few more links (another 4 pages) then you are 1 visitor, 2 visits, 8 pageviews.
From the wording I would imagine they mean visits, but from that number pageviews seems easier to believe.
Related: I blame Google Analytics for much of the confusion, as they are one of the few places (at least that I've come across) that refer to unique users as "visitors", and I've found that trips up many people when compared with "visits".
Me too. Besides, what makes me think that the "lead software engineer" (LSE?) for any company reads TC? Most LSEs wouldn't even know what it is. Seems a strange thing for him to have said.
OP - not trying to discredit you or be rude so I hope my comments don't come across that way. I'm just talking about the actual comment form the LSE.
>Me too. Besides, what makes me think that the "lead software engineer" (LSE?) for any company reads TC? Most LSEs wouldn't even know what it is. Seems a strange thing for him to have said.
This does not even make sense.
Where do you see even the slightest incompatibility of being a LSE for a company and reading TC?
TC, at it's inception, was a company about and for the startup community. LSE at a large corporation is about as far from the startup community as you can get. As I said, most LSEs wouldn't even know what it is.
Google is a large corporation. Apple is a large corporation. Yahoo is a large corporation. Still, I bet you their LSE know fully what TC is.
LSE's often leave large corporations to create their own startups. Or have created their own startups in the past (think Brad Fitzpatrick, for example). Or the want to move on to management (which is were knowing the market is beneficial, and TC helps).
Perhaps when you hear LSE you have some ancient, bureaucratic, enterprise, just finishing replacing COBOL with Java in mind, and mindless J2EE programmer drones. But not all --or even most-- LSEs are like that. And said company, Manwin, is as far from the typical bureaucratic old enterprise as you can get.
The same criticism is relevant for craigslist "revamping" as well:
People go to porn sites ostensibly for the content. So long as the page is remotely usable (even if it looks like it was made back in the 20th century) people will use it. Just like with craigslist. Unless the site had more content or a lower price point (not sure how you beat free on the price point) it's not clear if they'll achieve even a modicum of success
Basically what the domain name suggests; free cam girls.
The idea is simple: you can watch girls on cam for free. But to talk to them you have to buy tokens, you tip girls you like and so on. So it's essentially modeled a bit like a strip club but on a much grander scale.
It's different in the way it handles payments and has a very unique way of scoring girls. Leading to its own economy and community. Its quite different to the other sites that offer 'free' chat in terms that the girls become mini celebrities.
There innovation is very subtle, i don't think there's much room to really innovate on this space. I was trying to make the point that there isn't much room for anything original.
Yes and no. In the real world, then certainly; but My Free Cams does deliver that concept in a newer and better way than anything I've seen online previously. However I should remind you that I wasn't the one who claimed that MFC were original.
> Last time I checked the porn industry has been leading the industry in terms of tech.
That must have been 15 years ago. Most of the industry runs on shitty PHP/Perl scripts running on cPanel powered dedicated/shared servers. See http://www.gfy.com (Now Hiring, Buy and Sell and Business services forums - NSFW)
I'm not sure about this one. The design seems great if you don't mind browsing, but I had a difficult time sticking with specific macro- and micro- categories.
>> Half of the Internet-connected populous watches porn.
While this might be true, I've always thought this was a tad misleading. While half of all internet users watching a 3 minute video for giggles is one thing, this stat seems to suggest that 50% of all people go the internet to rub one off and do it everyday. This is sort of like saying "50% of all Americans saw Titanic."* This suggests that we all enjoyed it, willingly watched it, and didn't walk out half way through, none of which is true.
>While half of all internet users watching a 3 minute video for giggles is one thing, this stat seems to suggest that 50% of all people go the internet to rub one off and do it everyday.
I fear it's the latter. The numbers sure add up, if you ever see traffic stats from a large ISP.
Well, the mean could be affected by people not finding what they want and moving on to another site, so a high mean time could be a good thing.
I would expect that a good user experience would be reflected in a lower median time spent on the site though, but my knowledge of people's porn habits is admittedly limited.
40% higher is not a very big number either when you consider how low the visitor count is at this point. And time on site could be an important metric, but really it depends why time on site is higher and how that fits into their revenue model or engagement over time (repeat visitors, etc.).
I don't get it, what is the economics of this thing? I've looked through the site and haven't found any affiliate links or ads (bread and butter of free porn sites). How does this work?
They might be loss-leading with a clean site to get users before they start to introduce careful ads? The new Digg appeared to take a similar strategy.
The article didn't say, does this site have any intelligence? A modern porn site would be like Netflix, i.e. it will slowly "learn" what (sub)genres you like, whether you like blondes, brunettes, etc. and it will automatically suggest videos to you.
In my experience, Netflix's recommendations are approximately useless. Is your personal experience, or the experiences of people you know, different than mine?
When I was single and watching Netflix by myself, I thought their suggestions were good. I put a lot of time into rating movies and shows I've already seen, and it paid off in the suggestions. Once I moved in with my SO and we started sharing a Netflix account, the suggestions became useless. Some days she watches what she wants and some days I watch what I want. Other times we're watching something together that we both enjoy. The problem is, Netflix can't handle all of this, so we end up with some rather odd suggestions (how in the world does Netflix think I care enough about Russia's Toughest Prisons to make it one of my top 10, right alongside Visoneers and Extreme Couponing?)
I've been wondering why Netflix doesn't come up with some kind of personas. Each member of the household can rate movies, and then it can make recommendations for an individual or combination of them.
Is there a way to compute a "taste distance" for a combination of users reliably? I think if you just throw their ratings together you'll get a point with impossible taste (except if they like the same movies, in which case it won't matter). Maybe return only movies that were in the recommendations of both users?
>Once I moved in with my SO and we started sharing a Netflix account, the suggestions became useless.
That explains it then. Much of my account's viewing history is stuff watched with the SO. Apparently the recommendation engine puts a lot of weight on this viewing history. (Until today, I had assumed that recommendations depend only on those 1-5-star ratings.)
The main UX design miss is that, as a user, you don't have any context where you are in the stream of videos. You also can't tell if you are moving left or right with the videos. It ends up feeling frustrating to me.
One of the more curious UI bit is the way the videos pulse and flicker as you scan thru the available videos. Caught my eye more than a few times as I wrote this post.
I agree, I tried to scroll around and helper dialogues were popping up and telling me to use my arrow keys. The UI is horrible and this company should probably fold up and go home now before they waste all of their investors money.
edit: I've become accustomed to the horizontal scrolling in Netflix's interface, but Netflix also has (I assume) a lot of talented UI/UX people on staff, which this site obviously lacks.
Same here. My first reaction was, "No thanks - three videos at a time? Piss off." They'll never recover from this design IMO. It's an indication of an intractable design ideology. They'd have to fire/change half their staff to get over such a design flaw, I bet. And one of those is going to certainly be the CEO - thus this just is going to doom them. On the other hand, this is the best "information density" counter-example ever.
This is great. I have always thought that porn websites miss the mark both in 1) user friendliness and in 2) quality content. This at least fixes #1 and makes browsing a pleasant experience. Second step is to optimize the site for mobile, because the user will likely not be at their chairs.
As for content - my 2 cents is that society we need better actors and directors in this area. Just look at sex scenes in Weeds, Black Swan, or Shame - much less explicit skin compared to porn, but a lot sexier nonetheless. Frankly I am surprised that content is not better, with so much demand and money in the business.
Its easy to bash something someone's posted on HN. Having said that I think this is a really poorly thought out business proposition that is executed pretty badly too. Sorry to be so harsh to those that have probably put lots of hard work into this (no pun intended), but I think it is something they need to hear. Echoing what other people have said the porn industry is way ahead in terms tech and experience catering for as many different tastes as possible. I don't see that this site brings much new to the table, or if it does its not very obvious.
I don't get it. There doesn't seem to be a way to save links/videos. And the interface feels really restricted. They would have been better off imitating something like Pinterest.
Most successful sites use tags for folks to find what they want. And instead of a ribbon of "curated" links (ie: the content they're getting paid to show) they show all the matching screen caps tiled for your perusal (see Beeg.com for a NSFW example.)
Also, content. Being told "You've ran out of videos, come back tomorrow" is a recipe for failure. It might not be a problem once there's three months worth of content to wade through, but the site seemed small and not the "one-stop shop" that most users are looking for.