Like an erotic asphyxiation scene gone rogue, the adult film industry is being aggressively choked out. The problem is, they’re trying to convince porn consumers to pay for porn when they can get porn for free.
In a desperate gasp for air, porn giants like Playboy and Penthouse are turning to the technology that’s promised to revolutionize everything — cryptocurrency.
Vice Industry Tokens (vice tokens) bills itself as “a breakthrough in the online video entertainment industry.” With vice tokens, instead of coughing up cash, users will “get paid to watch porn.”
“The porn industry is dead,” Duane Hanson, an adult industry insider, tells Rooster Magazine. For years, Hanson worked with pornography sites owned by giants like Vivid Entertainment, Hustler and Playboy, and watched the sites struggle to survive.
“Tube sites are killing the industry,” Hanson says. “They give everything away for free to get as much traffic to their site as possible. And once someone can get it for free, it takes a lot to get them to pay.”
This translates to a shittier life for everyone involved in making skin flicks. Producers and performers alike are working much more and making much less money. Meanwhile, the people in charge of PornHub are making so much money they don’t know what to do with it. Starring in a gangbang should earn a living wage, but alas, these are dark times.
However, vice tokens could topple PornHub from their ivory tower and bring about equality for all involved in internet porn, from creators to curators to consumers.
To get paid, users have to engage with the platform by not only watching content, but also commenting, creating and sharing it. To maximize the payout, upload your own sex tape, or send an incest porn clip to your cousins — they’ll understand.
Rather than earning U.S .dollars, users earn vice tokens, which can be used for goods, services, and products on the platform itself, or with any of the platform’s partners. Because there are currently more than a dozen partner companies (including Penthouse and Playboy), token-holders should have zero difficulty finding a smut shop to spend their digital money. Tokens could be used to purchase premium porn or even a one-on-one cam conversation with your favorite adult star.
The pornographic currency will run on blockchain, but its creators don’t expect users to understand a damn thing about the technicalities.
“Consumers are earning a utility token by being on sites powered by Vice Token,” CEO Stuart Duncan tells the Daily Beast. “They’re not going to care how the blockchain works, all they’re going to care about is getting a product for free and then the bonus of getting something for it, getting paid.”
This innovative approach to pornography may be the only way to survive in our modern attention economy, where human attention is a scarce resource so precious, companies will pay for it.
It’s possible that vice tokens will choke and die like so many virtual currencies before it. It’s also possible that porn crypto will prevent tube sites from further strangling their competitors, and everyone in the adult industry will have a little more room to breathe.
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