Google's Pirate Update: long awaited and fantastic news for the porn industry!
 

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Using their Public Policy Blog, Google announced a number of reforms to their platform for the purposes of fighting piracy today. Some elements are pretty unimportant for adult entertainment (such as YouTube & AdWords changes), but I think that there's a real potential here for shifts in the porn industry and its ability to protect its content from pirates. The blog post itself is just a quick overview of the 'How Google Fights Piracy' report. You can click here to read the report, and I suggest you take a look at page 18 in particular for the most important aspect toward fighting piracy in porn.

Here's the quote I think best sums up the potential of this policy update for our industry:

Adult entertainment has had a huge issue with piracy and given the nature of the industry, options are limited for those that want to get control of their media back. One of the major problems has been huge tube sites take material from paysites and publish full-length clips. Outside of the industry, some file lockers have also started to share entire site rips and profit from membership accounts to their communities for faster download speeds. You'll also find camgirls having full-length videos of their activities uploaded across a multitude of sites without attribution or affiliate linking to the site it came from. Put simply, piracy in porn is rampant and not much can be done about it - until now, that is.

Google has obviously realized that piracy is becoming a big issue, and some of the larger names in the industry may stop supporting Google's platform if they continue to allow pirates to profit from their search engine. There's been a 15-fold increase in the number of DMCA requests sent to Google over the last 24 months - check their official copyright report statistics to see how this has become a real issue for the big G to handle.

So what's this going to do for the industry? Well hopefully, a shift away from the standard tube model of stealing full-length videos from sites that haven't authorized for their content to be distributed in that format.

Here are just a few of the offenders:

Pornhub

The biggest porn site in the world has had 20 individual reports made against it in the last week for infringing content against more than 10,000 URLS. You can read their report here.

XVideos

Another Manwin-owned entity. Yesterday, over 40,000 URLs were reported by Piracy Stop Here, LLC on behalf of 12 content owners. Only one URL was not removed from Google's search engine. XVideos DMCA report.

Porn-W.org

As far as I know, this site has the largest number of DMCA requests made against it in the adult industry. More than 24,000 requests have been made for a grand total of 870,000 URLs infringing on copyright. Their report can be read here.

So how do we move forward? Well, the best thing that content owners can do right now is make DMCA requests, and lots of them. Websites are now receiving direct pressure from Google for hosting illegal content: trust me, they'd be stupid not to react. So the bottom line is either you see your content removed, or a major source of traffic will start to decrease as they're brought down lower in Google's SERPs.

This is great news for the porn industry, and I hope over the next few months, changes are made across the board to instigate a response from sites that steal adult material for their profit.

why not simple ban the problematic urls for good? that will solve the problem, and save their time ... but, wonder, why they dont want to do it? because everyone will be searching porn on bing and others? lol, they can say whatever they want, tubes and torrents and spam will be still on top ... :2 cents:

how hard is to say, look, pornhub, we are removing 1000s of problematic links from your site weekly, hire people who will control your content, otherwise your domain will be banned ... ? :2 cents:

Lol ,xvideos is not owned by manwhich.It is owned by French guy named Stephane.

Wow, that's huge for content owners. Seems like actually an almost surprisingly reasonable way to evaluate piracy levels for a site. I guess it means Googe should be included in DMCA notices one might otherwise send just to a site and host.

Yeah, confused with XTube. Just noticed that myself. Fixing it up now. :thumbsup

EDIT: and now the edit timer ran out. Fantastic.

Send a e-mail to eric :)

Definitely. Quite a few SERPs are held for good keyword searches by sites that steal content - particularly in the webcam industry. I'm a little skeptical about how far Google will take this for adult sites, but any step toward reducing piracy is a good one.

Google let tubes destroy content owners and now they will destroy tubes. After that they will see what's left in adult and be sure to destroy that too

They just want to rank more sfw and less nsfw because they are anti porn (and anti women, anti small business, etc) to drive more traffic to their own shit

Get your legal streaming content here folks:)

interesting to say the least

Yet the likes of JT or manwin's fabian are giving keynote speeches and being nominated "kings of porn".

Yep, I totally agree with this.

They banned porn monetization on their own services. They don't care if the monetizer is legal or not.

You should always, always include Google on ANY DMCA notice you send out to anyone. :)

Google could 'solve' these piracy issues in a single day by blocking the top 1000 offenders based on the number of DMCA's Google receives weekly. Done. If those offending URLs want to get listed again they would need to be pirate-free for X # of months, etc. Of COURSE G could 'solve' their own piracy issues (not piracy itself).

So why do they not? Why do they play this shell game?

Exactly right. They don't want to lose their visitors to other engines.

I won't hold my breathe on this version 2 of their piracy effort. They did this 2 years ago. Ran the filter once, and then not again. I'll believe it when I see it.

Everything I have read and experienced suggests Google (along with the others like Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo/Tumblr) all basically hate porn.

Worse the ones they tolerate unofficially are only the tubes which publish things freely. They see them as "the leaders of the industry" and basically they are right.

So now some realism here. Do you really think Google is going to go up against all these tubes and pirates (who they see as the leaders of the industry) on your behalf and mine? Come on now. They don't care about you and the people you want them to harm are the only ones who even have a chance at successfully suing them.

Yes but considering other search engines usually follows what google doing that could be invalid fear.
Also,pirate/freeloader users usually wants everything for free,meaning how they probably most of them have adblock installed or dont bother ever to click on ads.

Because Google owns YouTube, they're probably going to be pretty careful about the idea of banning sites that have a lot of DMCA requests: especially video sites that allow users to upload content. I imagine that YouTube gets a heap of takedown notices, so it's not going to be in their best interests to have a blanket-ban policy on any site that receives DMCA requests. This isn't ideal, but I do hope that it becomes an important consideration for sites that rank well for competitive keywords with stolen content.

One of the shit things about AdBlock is the fact that it now considers text links to affiliate sites worthy of being culled. So if I have "CLICK HERE TO WATCH THIS GIRL LIVE" on a camgirl blog post, the whole line will be removed. Really fucking annoying that non-intrusive advertising like that is treated as worthy of being filtered.

I disagree. Other search engines would love to have a legit opening to getting more share of the search game.

If google blocked piracy and most porn, that would open the door for a very large market.

Don't disagree that piracy people want things for free and use adblocks etc. But perception is a huge thing when you are trying build momentum in increasing eyeballs.

I disagree. Google has been trying to deal with this clash of ideals since it started ('We hate porn but everyone searches for fucking porn and we're a fucking search engine! Argh!'). Big G doesn't give a flying diddlyfuck who might sue them, and in what court? Most of these tubes are registered in Cyprus and based God knows where. No, this has more to do with the above mentioned conflict they have been in since Day 1.

G is pinned down by its' own ethos: the best 'user experience' gets the highest ranking. But what if that 'best user experience' is coming from a pirate site? Hmmm....Instant conflict. (I'm sure if there was a mainstream movie theater company that was offering free admission to every Hollywood blockbuster - just pay for the popcorn - they would rank #1 in Google, too. What's a better 'user experience' than not paying for something?)

So all this means Google is PROFITING somehow from their relationship with the tubes and filelockers. End of story.

Yes true but there is a clear distinction between sexually-explicit Adult material and YouTube.

:thumbsup:thumbsup

It seems like we actually agree minus the suing comment at the end.

Who do the consumers think are the leaders of the porn industry? The tubes and the pirates largely. That is who Google cares about as well.

This stuff? It is for mainstream. It is for the movie and music producers who are on them. No matter what you might think or what they might "hint" at it is most certainly not for the adult industry. They don't give a shit about us unless it is to prevent our sites from coming up in non-adult keywords or to get rid of the "spammers". And often we are considered the "spammers" rightly or wrongly.

The movie and music industry actually has large trade groups which lobby the government and threatens to sue. In adult the people at the top are the pirates. It is not hard to see. Why would Google save the industry when we [collectively] don't seem to give a damn ourselves?

I agree completely. When it comes to lobbying the Gov't, if I had the resources (like a PussyCash or a Reality Kings) I would setup my own damn lobbying 'group' in Washington D.C. and claim I represent 'the Industry' (me) and lobby the fuck out of the most Conservative Bible-belt Congressmen. I would also partner with a Parents Group and lobby Congress from that angle with the slogan "No More Porn At The Dinner Table!" I'm talking PSA's, mainstream advertising, the whole shebang.

The Adult Industry should forget "piracy" and instead focus on becoming the Leaders of Eradicating Child Pornography and sex slavery/illegal prostitution around the world. And to accomplish these things (the lobbyists would say) the way is more control over access to porn. The 'pirates' would be swept up in this and be a secondary casualty (even though they are really the primary target).

The 'winners' would be content producers. Tube sites would have to abandon their 'user upload' policies and go content providers only. Oh - and what about sites that won't comply with US law? Time to figure out a way to BLOCK that website from within the US. The US does own the fucking Internet, after all, and we know you can block entire countries. :)

I completely agree that their focus here is on the mainstream industry, which is why I focused heavily upon the fact that there's an automatic algorithmic change that comes with sites having a lot of DMCA requests lodged against it.

I doubt you're going to see 'Backdoor Sluts Volume 7' having its own rich snippet in SERPs that links you directly to a store so you can purchase it legally, but I do hope the first search result will now be to paysites instead of site rip directories.

It's still early days, so hopefully we can all agree that any news re: content theft and Google punishing it is a step in the right direction.

Are the tubes going to be wiped off of their #1 spots overnight? Probably not. Will they see a gradual decline if they continue to have numerous DMCA requests lodged against them? Probably so.

Any move in the right direction is definitely a good move.

Pretty sure this was old news about a year or two ago where supposedly Google was going to take DMCA notices and the like into the rankings but it never happened, infact you can probably find a bunch of old stuff about it on this forum.

I seriously wouldn't hold my breath on Google doing anything anytime soon especially when it comes to porn because like signupdamnit said...Google could care less about the adult industry.

Didn't make a difference so who cares?

This is the 'second' update, so to speak. They literally announced it about 48 hours ago. They're taking it a lot more seriously this time, methinks.

Hopefully something good is going to come out of it!

I know how most people feel like google should just ban all tubes and lockers that steal content but the same freedoms that allow the porn industry to exists also grants the right to tube sites and file lockers to exist and let people upload.
Because of that they can only ban individual url's but not whole domains, it's pretty hard to figure out which tubes and lockers have real people uploading pirate stuff and which ones are uploading it themselves (I mean you can figure that out easy, but in legal terms prove it without a doubt so it can hold in court.)

Obviously they should've come out with algorithm of punishing the overall rankings of the domain as a hole based on big number of complaints (not just like a number but lets say 500 listed url and notices received for 300, with more than 50% illegal stuff on a domain you can pretty safely say it's owners are to blame)

Well time will tell, but if illegal tubes start losing rankings in google there will be a major shift in how things work

Because google makes most of its money on the back of piracy. Either directly with its "Youtube" or indirectly with its search engine.


Like it or not,
The fact is that trolls, pirates, hate monger, conspiracy theorists and porn make up the vast bulk of the Internet traffic. Therefore Google's game is to do the least possible, play the victim and hide behind "freedom of speech in order to placate the scum and the real-victims.

Nothing will get better until someone comes up with an alternative method of distribution to the Internet.

I agree. People would just go to Bing. Bing's videos section is crazy and you can even narrow the results by tube site.

Plus, Would it really help that much? In the movie "Sex Movie", Jack Black rattles off all the major tubes sites by heart. Many people know those sites by heart.

But I do appreciate the thought.

Nothing will change.. If you search for porn vid now, it's still nothing but illegal tubes. Google knows that those sites use stolen content, they could manually put bans on them if they wanted to.

Google is your Lord and Saviour -- not!

Steal a little, you go to jail. Steal a shit-ton, you become a hero. Always been like that, always will be.

Ye of little faith. Give it time before you slag Google off - they might come through.

" Google also factors in the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site as one signal among the hundreds that we take into account when ranking search results. Consequently, sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in search results "

So. They get ass tons of DMCA's for a site and they MAY appear LOWER in the search results.

If you own a store and you catch a thief do you let him back into the store the next day? No, you give him a trespass warning and have him arrested the next time he comes back.

They catch these thieves and they MAY LOWER the listings. How nice.

so every tube that ranks high is illegal? how do you figure?

site porn.com sell drugs on site see viagara, cialis no doctor. how that ligal?

Exactly how is this great for the adult business? Nothing has happened. Same goes for mainstream. There are still tons and tons of SERPS for every adult term and huge mainstream movies going to tubes, torrents, and file lockers and if you add torrent or P2P to any term all you get is stolen content.

Please show examples of free sites that steal content not showing, while other pay sites show?

Don't do that - it'd be suicide for them to collaborate in any way with you. What to do is prop up a "concerned citizens group" who would "force" you to agree to their terms, and with fire and furious anger rip through the base, evil, godless heathen who make porn, PORN! available to youngsters. You would capitulate, agreeing to shed your lucifer persona and walk in the light and obey their strict statutes. As the unheilig tumbled before their righteous wrath, those who didn't bend their knees, the free tubes, the worst of the lot, the very heels of satan, would bear the brunt of the outraged host.

That's the way to do it.

Either this post is about a change that is going to have an impact in the FUTURE or this information is rubbish spewed by Google in the guise of being news.

Take a look here for an easy way to check the facts: http://bit.ly/uzoMut

Not sure that anyone is sending in DMCA's for the word "porn".

But having said that...for our site I noticed that the first page results are now pornhub, redtube, etc. (I'm still number one, but they now fill up all the other spots).

I'm not sure how fast or slow changes can happen when something like this happens with Google.
I'll be curious to see how it goes in the next couple of weeks.

I know that when we changed the site design completely over earlier this year, it took a few days for me to regain my number one spot.

This is also a good move! I'm with you - throw religious zealotry into it and shit will change. :)

As for the impact this Google boondoggle will have: give it a few weeks. Then watch how nothing changes. LOL

Robbie,

If this were actually true....

Originally Posted by Google
In addition to removing pages from search results when notified by copyright owners, Google also factors in the number of valid copyright removal notices we receive for any given site as one signal among the hundreds that we take into account when ranking search results. Consequently, sites with high numbers of removal notices may appear lower in search results. ... In October 2014, we have improved and refined the DMCA demotion signal in search results, increasing the effectiveness of just one tool rightsholders have at their disposal.


.... many of those listings would have changed already. :2 cents:

They said "penalize"which means losing ranks for everything.not just a specific keyword.But they probably just bullshited as usual.

That's the part I'm unsure of though.

Will they be "penalized" for every keyword? Or just the instances where they are being DMCA'ed about certain keywords?

Obviously if it becomes a penalty across the board, then that would definitely change the search for "porn".

But if it would get them out of the more specific searches (like I'm thinking it will), that would be a lot more valuable.
Most people already have some idea of what they are looking for.

If I like girls with big ass...I'm not gonna search for "porn". I'm gonna search for big ass. Not sure if this would affect that search either. But it might.

Now if I like a certain girl and I'm ready to jerk to her...then I might search for Ava Devine or Lisa Ann. Getting those kind of search engine results cleaned up would be very profitable.

Or let's say I look up a well known brand like Hustler or Naughty America. Having pirate sites out of the results would make a nice difference.

For me, I'd like to see NO pirate site results for the term Claudia Marie on the first page. Right now...it's full of them. :(

So far penalization always meant how you lose most of the rankings,if not all.
So in this case it wont be any effect,or it will be full effect,not just for specified keyword.

Robbie,

Even if it were only for offending pages, that would mean listings for those pages being removed. Now ask yourself, if hundreds or thousands of pages of a large site were suddenly delisted due to penalties, what would happen to the other pages of that site which were not the direct target of the action... and what would be the impact of that site's ability to rank overall?

If anything like this was ever actually implemented, the rankings on high value terms like Porn, Sex Videos, XXX and others would change radically overnight. Google would also have to severely penalize its own sites including YouTube or face a stiff possibility of an anti-trust suit being brought against them. The whole story is bogus and would never actually happen... unless required by law.

Would it change overnight?
As I said earlier, whenever I have made changes (like we did earlier this year when we moved to Elevated X), it takes a few days for Google to catch up as it spiders the web.

Maybe you're right and it's all b.s., but I'm hopeful that after a few days we might see some changes for the better. If not, then we don't lose anything we haven't already lost anyway.

50 first serps still to tubes ;)