You're missing part of my point. I'm not saying that a pay per scene option is necessarily cheaper overall if you are a heavy consumer, but it is more palatable psychologically and does gain you new customers who would likely make regular but small purchases if given the chance but are currently scared off by large monthly commitments. Take dlc as an example. Plenty of people spend small amounts of money on things like costumes, which actually adds up to a significant amount over time. Now, if instead of that, all content was included in the main game but games cost $100+, what do you think the reaction would be? A smaller customer base as many would not be prepared to pay that as a lump sum, perhaps? Anyway, there wouldn't be anything stopping them from retaining the subscription option in addition to per-scene purchase.
You're saying this like no one's thought of it. They have. And some have tried it out. The companies that make their own content might make a couple hundred dollars off of it a month which, while something in theory, is almost never the difference between being profitable and not being profitable, or being being barely profitable and being rich. And on top of that, they know it has the capability to lose them customers who are willing to pay for a couple scenes a month as opposed to continuing their membership at $20-30 a month. For subscription companies, the numbers just don't add up most of the time. Now, for sites that don't actually create their own content, it is a viable option, and some are actually doing it right now, though it still isn't setting the world on fire, to be honest.
Edit: And the reason that DLC and in-app purchases do so well is because they're priced low enough to get into the impulse purchase territory. The prices that I just told you about for the few people that do offer to sell scenes by the scene are at the high end of impulse purchase territory, and most of the market is actually well above that territory.
So they're retaining all their customers and aren't serving an ever dwindling base? Nowhere in the OP's article does it claim that they've been able to arrest the fall in active subscribers. In fact it makes it sound as if they're making a significant chunk of change now from trolling for damages rather than just selling their product. Furthermore, I never made any claims to know what their customers want to see in terms of scenes, so how you know what I think is a mystery to me. I'll stick with my original point though: being able to judge the success of productions through direct sales figures would be beneficial in tailoring products to the tastes of customers as well as identifying niches that might be worthy of exploration.
Many sites have internal ratings measures, as well as measures like page views and downloads, to tell them what people are watching. They don't need direct sales data to tell them that. And for the sites that have it, page views/traffic on the non-membership pages can basically tell them what scenes are appealing to people that aren't actually members. In addition to conversion rates (i.e. which scenes, when they are the first scene a person views on the non-membership site, lead to the most members actually joining the site by the end of that session).
And sites aren't losing customers because they don't know which scenes are popular. They're losing customers because there's a much smaller customer base than there was 5-10 years ago, because people nowadays have been conditioned to not be willing to pay for porn period, no matter the quantity or quality of it offered.
And because I need to single this out specifically:
Nowhere in the OP's article does it claim that they've been able to arrest the fall in active subscribers. In fact it makes it sound as if they're making a significant chunk of change now from trolling for damages rather than just selling their product.
The income earned by all the suits represents less than five per cent of Malibu Media’s profits, Lipscomb said.
