Those are good points...BUT you are waaaay underestimating what people who are in this business know about their own stuff. I and most others know exactly how and why our traffic and money fluctuate. It's our business to know. And trust me...the piracy of today is nothing like usergroups.
As far as the tube sites you mentioned "out seo'ing" everybody...Bullshit. When you have millions of people uploading stolen content and then posting it on huge surfer forums every minute of every day...There is no genius SEO guru involved. That's just plain out numbers of people doing it. I had the same phenomenom from 1998 to 3 years ago with my tgp's. When I was Ampland I had over 30,000 uniques plus a day just from Google. When you added in Yahoo, MSN, and the other search engines we had massive search engine traffic.
And I didn't do squat for it. It was just a matter of sheer numbers.
And yeah, I can definitely understand your peeve with people blaming anything but themselves...but in this case the numbers simply don't lie. And neither does common sense. The rise of mass pirating of content and sales dropping correlate almost exactly. And common sense tells you that if you can get something for free you are less likely to pay for it.
But as I said earlier, I don't see a lot of guys hurt so bad that they are "failing", unless you're like me. For me I AM failing because I'm not growing. Yeah, I'm "losing" at a lot smaller rate than a lot of others...but that's not how I do things. If I'm running sideways or not increasing revenue then I consider it a fail. Doesn't mean that a lot of guys are going out of business. But it does mean trimming stuff down. Cutting staff, etc.
And by the way, the tube sites you mentioned don't even have to "work smarter". The entire model is the genius part. Once they had that in place the script and the surfers do all the work while they kicked back and made money off of prepaid dating and cam spots and now by selling traffic to traffic brokers.
That IS smart. But too late for me and the thousands of others trying to copy the tube model. Just like with TGP's. When we were among the first with the most and then EVERYBODY tried to buy a script and make a "fake" tgp that circle jerked. It just didn't work. People tend to pick and choose in the beginning and then it's a done deal.
Same with tubes. I don't foresee how anybody could start a tube today and ever knock those big guys off their thrones.
Anyway, I'd still like to know who at least one of those guys who is "quietly growing and taking advantage of everone's ignorance of search engines and traffic" are.
What ignorance? People are searching for free full length movies. End of story.
Doesn't take any special knowledge of SEO to figure that out.