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Adult giant Pornhub launched a new premium service tier yesterday and declared its intent to become the Netflix of porn with a $9.99 all-you-can…erm….consume monthly fee, and access to advanced features that free users don’t currently enjoy. Whether the free users will notice the difference while awkwardly mousing with their off hands is still up in the air. Pornhub intends to entice its users with full access to the site’s existing content library, exclusive full-length adult titles offered in 1080p, faster playback, and ad-free browsing.

“Simply put, Pornhub Premium, is setting the new standard. Users will benefit from enhanced access to all of the content they already enjoy on Pornhub.com – with improved streaming quality – as well as over 100,000 full-length premium exclusive scenes at the touch of a finger or click of the mouse,” said Corey Price, vice president of Pornhub. “We’re looking to take the crown as the ‘Netflix of porn,’ and with the colossal amount of content we’ll be providing – and adding tons more daily – we’re confident our fan base will totally embrace this product and reinforce our position as the top provider of on-demand adult video.”

I will now attempt to keep juvenile word humor to a minimum while I discuss the business and technical aspects of the service. Trust me, it’s hard.

The impact of the Internet on the porn industry

Over the past 15 years, a great deal of ink has been spilled on the damage the Internet has done to the music industry. The film industry has also been impacted, though to a lesser extent (much of that impact has been on home rental as opposed to ticket sales). The adult industry doesn’t get as much attention. That’s at least partly due to lingering puritan attitudes towards sex and sexuality — American media doesn’t blink at showing an entire city being wiped off the map by nuclear war, but blanches at the idea of an actual breast on television.

It’s almost impossible to get firm numbers on the adult market, but all available evidence suggests that the Internet has been exceptionally bad for the XXX business. Once upon a time, hotels did brisk business offering “adult” channels to couples and teenagers not yet old enough to know their parents would see what they’d ordered the night before. Triple-X peep shows and porn theaters have markedly declined, and performers now have much more control over their own marketing, fan base, and messages.

The impact of these changes is hard to quantify since so little data is given out, but it’s much more common for fans of a particular actress to interact (or at least attempt to interact) with her via Twitter or a Reddit AMA. Websites like Clips4sale and the various pornographic content aggregators theoretically give a performer a much easier way to get in touch with fans — but you can’t eat exposure (no, not even in porn).

You have no idea how difficult it was to find appropriate images for this story

I’d argue that the sheer amount of adult content available online has actually transformed the adult industry more than film or music. Music was always available for free on the radio and could be readily purchased via cassettes, CDs, or vinyl LP. Even back in the days when ABC, NBC, and CBS dominated America’s airwaves, broadcasting films was a big business and your local Blockbuster had thousands of titles available on VHS and DVD. If you wanted adult content — well, more than a few softcore movies, anyway — you had to either buy it from a handful of print sources or take a trip to one of the aforementioned seedy adult stores.

Add all this up, and you have a scenario in which the reaction to Pornhub declaring itself the Netflix of the adult industry is likely to be met with puzzled glances more than strong subscription numbers. Porn has become the commodity that everyone enjoys and precious few pay for. Pornhub claims that it will create dedicated Android and Roku applications, offer individuals the option to cancel subscriptions immediately, without hassle or red tape, and that it plans to offer VR offerings by Q1 2016.

That kind of technological push could keep Pornhub in exclusive territory, especially if it leaps to 4K resolutions quickly and makes good on its promise to offer an ad-free, malware-free, and high-quality service. But in an era when porn can be had in seconds by literally anyone who wants it, and in a mind-bogglingly huge array of styles, choices, sexualities, and niche interests, it remains to be seen if any company can make a go of selling access to something tens of thousands of people are willing to provide for free.