A Reddit thread on the subject garnered thousands of responses.
According to internet meme lore, if something—anything—exists online, you can be damn sure there’s porn of it. And in 2019, odds are you’ll be able to find that porn on one of the many, many free sites out there dedicated to serving up something for everybody. According to a popular Reddit thread which blew up over the weekend, however, plenty of people still choose to pay for their porn—and they have some pretty compelling reasons. Here are a few that Reddit users called out most frequently.
If you like cam sites, you pretty much have to pay.
As one of several commenters noted, “If you like a specific camgirl or amateur actress, you gotta pay to get their videos. You might find some online but that’s it.” This led to an illuminating discussion on what exactly viewers get from the cam girl experience that they don’t find on other sites; namely, personal interaction.
“Former camgirl here,” another user said. “Like 80 percent of my money was made in private shows, and a surprising amount of it was just lonely guys wanting [to] talk. While I’m naked, obviously. But still.” Her remarks prompted others to chime in on the emotional labor that is often ignored but innate to sex work.
“Professional naked people one-on0-one always end up just socializing and therapy,” said one commenter. “No one wants to admit they just want genuine human contact… so they pay for topless human contact. I always found it funny that sex work is looked down upon because the majority of the work is being a professional friend with healthy boundaries.”
The more niche your interests, the more it’s worth paying.
While sites like PornHub cater to a wide variety of tastes, a more discerning viewer might still prefer to pay for what they want, especially if they’re into newer porn mediums like VR, which have yet to fully break into the mainstream, or if they have a particular fetish. “I think VR stuff is the one thing that’s totally worth paying for sometimes,” one commenter said. “Second thing has been if I really like a particular model/actress, or I guess for some people if you have a specific interest.”
Paying for porn ultimately means you get more porn.
As with any other industry, the economic law of supply and demand applies here. When a business knows it has a certain number of paying customers who are willing to fork out for their product, they’ll invest in making more. And your favorite studios will only survive as long as they can afford to keep shooting.
As adult film producer and performer Jessica Drake once told Men’s Health, “When a customer joins a paid porn site, a subscription service, or buys a DVD, they’re supporting the actual people who have created the product, and essentially enabling that site, company, or person to continue to create more porn.
Paid-for porn is safer and more secure.
If we’re being honest, we’ve all encountered those barrages of pop-up ads which appear at the worst possible moment. But just as a YouTube Premium subscription would, paying for your preferred service makes all of that nuisance advertising a thing of the past.
And if your main concern is that your porn purchases will show up on your credit card statements, you can stop worrying: The entire industry is built around knowing what people want and also valuing people’s privacy. Pretty much every adult site out there processes transactions through an intermediary company or generically named vendor account, so any charges will appear entirely innocuous. And these companies, just like Amazon or eBay, value your business—so you can rest assured that your personal information is safe.