I know I make a lot of retail analogies. I make a lot of analogies period. Blow me. I like analogies. Here's another one:

Stores, places of retail sales and other physical shops that sell tangible goods don't come pre-equipped with a never-ending supply of units. Other companies manufacture items for retail or wholesale. These other companies either lease or sell their units to the individual stores or entire chains. The individual stores or the chains hire buyers to shop the trade shows of the unit manufacturers and come back with the best products to sell.

"Content makes money and content costs money. To lease or buy is not the question. The question is in the mix."

The shop then prices the units at a mark-up to their customers. When the products run out or are no longer salable, the buyer goes and buys some more. Some stores will sell items on consignment/lease. This means that instead of buying the items out right, the shop will house the product and share a cut of the sale with the manufacturer or supplier.

Vending machines operate along a consignment/lease model. A gum machine in the doorway of the bookstore next to the mall movie theater is there for a reason. It draws moviegoers waiting on showings, it gets new bodies in the bookstore and it garners the storeowner a little bit of income.

When you purchase content for an adult site, you are stocking a store. You are the buyer. Content websites are the trade shows for content providers. Some sell products that you get to take with you and put on the virtual shelves of your adult store. Others lease their content products and allow you display them on your store while they maintain total control over the actual adult content item.

If you own a paysite or are thinking of starting one, you know that the current porn market requires huge amounts of content from their paysites. There can't be enough content it almost seems. Nearly any paysite is going to have gigs full of still images, triple gigs of video, stories out the butt, games, chat, webcams, casinos and virtual stores. If a site owner were to truly manufacture all that content, they would have to have a staff comparable to a network television station in a mid-sized city. They buy content from providers and you better believe they lease a great deal too.

The dilemma for the site owner is the ratio of leased content to purchased content.

Many who own paysites started out specializing in some form of content. They took photos or provided videos or served sex web chat to slobbering surfers. Other paysite owners will employ artists who exclusively produce specialized kinds of content for the site. Nevertheless, the adult paysite owner of today needs more than what they can realistically produce so they buy and lease content from providers.

Of that content they acquire from others they have to decide how much they can afford to pipe through their servers and how much needs to come from other people's servers. The paysite owner likewise needs to take into account the originality of their purchased or leased content. If the stills aren't so fresh, then some novel video feeds on lease will do well. If your paysite is an adult toy store with units you own, some leased games would make it stickier.

Say you don't own a paysite. You might just be one of the kabillions of adult webmasters who make their living selling memberships to paysites. You take on many forms and are invaluable to the network of Internet porn. If the adult Internet were a big mall the paysites would be the flagship stores and you would be the owners of the kiosks and smaller shops. You attract your own clientele but you benefit from the drawing power of the flagships. You need products too.

If you have a free site, most times leased content is a no go. More than likely, you have to buy your content. AVS sites used to be able to put leased content behind their adult IDs, but even they are being turned away by lease providers.

You can still find a few lease providers that allow AVS sites to use their stuff but almost none will lease to the free site owner. This leaves the free site owner who uses their own domain and hosting in the unfortunate circumstance of having to pay for all that bandwidth.

If you own a TGP or top list, then your content comes from your submitters and their servers. If you submit to TGPs and the like with image and video galleries from your own hosting, then you probably buy your content. If you run almost any kind of free entry adult page what content you display is probably limited and designed to lead customers to your sponsors or your own paysite.

So lets review. You can buy content or lease content. If you buy content, you have to serve that content on your hosting. If you lease content, the provider hosts it. A pay site can lease content easily. A free site, or and AVS site will have a very difficult time finding an adult leaser. Lease content can be as little as one feature or can be as massive as an entire plug-in member's area. Pay content is highly affordable. Lease content is highly affordable. Pay content can be created exclusively for a higher price. Lease content can be used exclusively for a higher price. Many adult paysites and networks use leased content. Many who own paysites and networks use pay content. Content makes money and content costs money. To lease or buy is not the question. The question is in the mix.

We would all love to be porn moguls who lounge around the pool while nude models and film crews frolic around the grounds. We all want the ranch with the offices on site right next door to film studio.

The fact is most of us in this field work our asses off day in and out. Our stores and service centers have to be open and available twenty four hours a day. To be able to pay the dream staff we would have to be far higher on the food chain of industry. We are but humans. Self-producing the amount of content needed for the adult paysite of the present would only be possible if we were a certain men's magazine creator and even he's having a hard time on the web. How's that for an analogy?