The porn industry has had a rocky relationship with the Internet. Before everything moved to the web, explicit content consisted primarily of VHS / DVDs, magazines and pay-per-view rentals. It was an area that people no doubt indulged in but it was almost taboo to talk about.
The advent of the Internet put pornography within reach of anyone that wanted to seek it out. What's more, virtually anyone with a digital camera or webcam could now get into the business, many of which did so (and continue to do so) not for money but as a form of exhibitionism.
But the biggest blow to the porn industry was the fact that content that people used to pay good money for was now being offered for free online. While the web made porn much more socially acceptable, it also left much of the traditional industry in shambles and forced those that stuck around to reinvent their business.
With more people having access to porn than ever before, it should come as little surprise that porn is more popular now than ever before. The general consensus remains that porn is free on the Internet (well, ad-supported) although there are a number of niche sites and those that offer high-quality content for a premium.
We can now add one of the world's largest porn sites to that list.
PornHub is re-launching its premium offering as a $9.99 per month subscription service. As The Verge notes, the subscription does away with advertising and offers viewers high-quality HD streams, high-speed servers and even exclusive content.
It's accessible on both desktop and mobile browsers and the company is working on apps for Android and Roku. Heck, they're even planning to add virtual reality integration next year.
The publication correctly points out that nothing PornHub is doing here is groundbreaking as other sites have also tried to become the Netflix of porn. But what's different with PornHub is the scale; it's an absolutely huge site in terms of traffic. It's a bold undertaking as asking people to pay for a commodity that's abundantly free elsewhere hasn't proven terribly successful but for those that absolutely despise ads and prefer only the highest-quality content, they now have another option to entertain.