Flutterby™! : economics of porn

ErosBlog has a fascinating post on the economics of porn web sites: Cookie Cutter Porn Paysites. One of the pastimes over at Sensible Erection is trolling various sites for their sample pages and providing a huge list of them, like this. I've always wondered, given what's available in front of the wall, what the economics of what's behind the wall is. It's even weirder when you look at a URL and see DOMAI or Hegre in the URL and realize that if that sort of image is your kink you could head on over to the source material and get all you wanted for probably less than membership at most of these sites.

I probably just don't understand the economics of porn or the mindset of the porn consumer, but it seems to me that there's definitely some irrational behavior and leverage of incomplete knowledge going on here.