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Porn vs News

2009-05-30 14:43:33.544251+00 by Dan Lyke 11 comments

Observation OTD, Hanan Cohen asks:

What's the difference between porn and news? Why do people pay for online porn but don't pay for online news?

[ related topics: Sexual Culture Current Events Journalism and Media ]

comments in ascending chronological order (reverse):

#Comment Re: made: 2009-05-30 16:06:16.671392+00 by: hananc

Dov Alfon, Haaretz' editor in chief, replied to my tweet:

There is no difference. 7% of porn users pay for it, while 5% pay for news. Difference is news is much more expensive to produce.

It would be interesting to validate those stats.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-05-30 16:21:37.72651+00 by: JT

If you're short on money due to economic harships, consider consolidating these expenses and paying for naked news.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-05-31 10:36:36.049463+00 by: DaveP

My initial tongue-in-cheek answer was "Well, online porn is more useful!"

More seriously, what passes for news these days isn't all that useful to me. I've given up on our local newspaper, since they don't cover the local issues that I'm interested in. That's done by the neighborhood newspaper. TV news? There's about five minutes of actual news in a half-hour newscast.

It's the same sort of feeling as when I went seriously car-shopping last year. I spent a half-dozen weekends looking around, and couldn't find a single product I wanted to spend my money on (the closest car was a VW Golf GTI R32, but it's only available in the US with a sunroof, which means the roof's too low and I bonk my noggin).

At least with the news, I donated some money to the neighborhood newspaper.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-05-31 14:20:24.14726+00 by: TheSHAD0W

Considering there's more porn out there on free sites than you could go through in a lifetime, I can't understand why anyone would pay for porn. News, at least, has an expiration and you need to keep paying people to cover the new stuff.

The solution to this, and to the intellectual property piracy problem, and to many other problems that crop up when you cross abundance with scarcity, is micropayments.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-05-31 20:10:29.555013+00 by: meuon

Percieved value and truth/reality in content. Guess that means I believe a faked orgasm more than most news articles

#Comment Re: made: 2009-05-31 20:20:52.95997+00 by: Dan Lyke

I think seeing a faked orgasm has more value to me than seeing the sports scores or the real estate section...

#Comment Re: made: 2009-05-31 22:32:03.098547+00 by: markd

Considering how poorly the mainstream media covers the computer industry, porn is a fucking documentary in comparison.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-06-01 01:50:34.43188+00 by: Dan Lyke

Oooh! Great observation: Porn covers fucking more accurately than "the news" covers any area in which I have any expertise.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-06-01 09:49:13.94593+00 by: hananc

[Arianna Huffington] dismissed the concept of online subscriptions as a viable income channel, arguing that they only worked for "really weird porn".

http://www.editorsweblog.org/n...on_post_and_the_huffington_p.php

#Comment Re: made: 2009-06-01 19:58:17.460699+00 by: petronius

Arrianna Huffington's business plan wasn't based on advertising so much as making sure she didn't sign a pre-nup with her oil-man ex.

#Comment Re: made: 2009-06-01 20:18:33.296333+00 by: Dan Lyke

Admittedly I haven't made a big research of the subject domain, but it seems like several of the viable income porn sites aren't anywhere near "really weird". Beautiful Agony is almost safe for work, and maybe it's just that I live near San Francisco, but the various Kink.com websites seem nearly like things one might casually discuss over lunch.

It seems to me that much of the investigative journalism these days is a way to hype up book demand, so maybe the sales model is that we'll start to get our press releases directly, rather than as badly rewritten newspaper articles, and we'll still get our investigative journalism as book length works.