There’s a new porn web site in town, called “MLNP.TV“. It features user-provided porn – sort of like a higher-end “Youporn,” on which sexy (and some not-so-sexy) couples, and individuals, can post themselves having (gasp!) real sex. I wrote about it some months ago, complaining about the pricing model. They haven’t changed the pricing model, and I haven’t changed my view of it.

Still, I love the idea.

I love web sites that feature real sex, real people, real orgasms, having pleasure for themselves, rather than for me. I love seeing sex that is made hotter for the people having it by the fact that I might be watching. This is why I love “I Feel Myself.” Even though none of you has caused me to get a free subscription. 🙁

So I really want to love MLNP.

But I can’t stand it.

It’s bad in almost every way.

The technology behind the web site is glitchy – every time I try to watch a video there, something or other goes wrong.

The web site’s design itself is glitchy – it’s hard to operate, to navigate. Just technically. For example, go to this page and try to navigate down to see the five purported films of bzandgloria. You can do it, but it’s not easy, or intuitive. It’s not easy to get an overview of the videos available for a given contributor, or in a given category.

The organization of the films is worse than haphazard. Films are “tagged” by the folks who post them. This means that tags are entirely useless, as the hipster porn stars are busy showing off their ironic humor, tagging films with things like “Yes! Yes! Yes!,” or “Frolicsome” or “Owowowheynow.” And then there are site-wide “categories,” which, themselves, seem to be more about hipster self-satisfaction than actual communication to users – categories include “Yummy,” “Pretty,” “Romping,” “Clitastic,” and “Spectacular.”

Some of the films feature “free peeks,” which are brief, or, in some cases, extensive previews of the film. Others don’t. This would be fine, were it not for the way the site is priced:

For five dollars, you can “rent” access to a video for three weeks. Of this, half goes to the performer, and half goes to MLNP.tv. I get it. It’s a cool business model that encourages people to submit their stuff, and makes really simple the sharing of proceeds with performers.

The videos are short (some are just a minute or three long) or long (some are half an hour or so). The one-size-fits-all pricing, combined with the wide variety of material available, just renders the whole thing useless, as far as I’m concerned. I want to be able to browse around, to see what I like. And honestly, I don’t want a film for three weeks. That’s not how I, um, view my porn. I typically want a film once. Or maybe twice. For a small number of minutes.

There is, as I said earlier, an air of the self-satisfied to the whole enterprise, whether it’s Cindy Gallop’s messianic (TED-talk) zeal for her project, or Violet’s and Rye’s relentless hyping.

If the project were more, um, satisfying, this would bother me less.

As I said, I do like the idea – provide a forum for folks to share their hotness. But as a viewer, I don’t want to pay a (relatively) big price for each video I watch, and to do so sight unseen. I’d much prefer to pay, say, for twenty minutes of viewing. Or unlimited viewing for a day, or week, or month. And then let the revenues be shared with the performers behind the scenes. The designers of MLNP.tv have allowed their nifty vision of the economic model (contributors and web site split the revenues 50-50) to drive an ultimately user-unfriendly experience.

The great virtue of MLNP.tv – that it is a great turn-on for its contributors – is its greatest problem. It’s designed to be a turn-on for its contributors, to the detriment of its viewers’ experiences. Here are just a few things they could do that (I have a hunch) will never happen because they would offend the creators’ sensibilities, but that would result in a much better web site:

1. Offer a more conventional subscription model – $x/month, week, day. Or sell bundles of minutes. And/or maybe move to a more “micro-payment”-y cost for individual views of videos (ten cents? twenty cents?).

2. Overhaul the web site. It’s not user-friendly. At all.

3. Implement categories that are at least a little more porn-conventional (or at least, communicative). If I want to see blowjobs, let me see blowjobs. Don’t make me figure out whether “yummy” or “giving” or some other clever combination of letters is hipster code for blowjobs. Standardize them across the site. They could let the hipster tags remain, but at least use the categories in a way that’s useful.

4. Think about incentivizing the community aspect of it a bit by offering credits in exchange for people’s submitting their videos. Or offering the opportunity to earn credits with views.

Just a few thoughts.

I continue to be hopeful about the web site: it does seem to be attracting some hot porn. I just think it’s not going to attract me as a regular viewer unless some aspects of it change.

wickedwed

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