The economics of it.

There are an awful lot of very good vids out there, with high production values and which are, therefore expensive to produce.

They are, no doubt, also fun to produce, but probably not so much fun as to be worth the cost, particularly as you could have just as much, if not more, fun doing it without cameras and lights.

Vast numbers of them are available to view free and many of them can be downloaded, also for free.

This puzzles me. If the product is provided free or, at least, available for free, how does anyone make any money producing and publishing them?

I'm hoping that among LSF users someone(s) know the answer to that.

Geoffrey Stirling.

I know there are a lot of people who buy them or steal them then upload them on other sites for free access. I can’t really understand why.

I think the answer is that these days it is very difficult to make a living by way of spanking video production alone. I know this is why a lot of creators have moved to platforms such as Onlyfans, and producing custom videos that are not for public release. Certainly though the high production value videos that you are seeing on various free tube sites are most likely to have been stolen and reproduced without permission of the producer(s).

I know that a lot of content creators (i.e. Michael Masterson, Eve Howard, Miss Chris, David Pierson) have publically commented on how the tube sites and the content thieves have dramatically impacted the industry in the last 20 years.

There are other ways of making money.

For example: Torvea Customs will make videos to order. They cover all of their production costs and make a profit on that first sale. No, they aren't getting rich, but it seems that they make a living off of it.

My guess would be that a custom made Torvea video would be very, very expensive.

Geoffrey Stirling.

It depends on what you call very expensive. I know someone who ordered from them. The price quoted was from about a year or two ago and may have risen, but just to give you an idea:
For a 10 minute or so spanking video (with no sex):
2 women 250.00
1 man and one woman 150.0

So expensive, but it much lower than I thought possible. I've also seen a copy of the finished product - it was professional quality. I'm tempted to contact them myself, but then I'd have to decide which fantasy I would like to see in a video, and that would be a tough pick.

Yes, a lot of videos are available for free, but that doesn't mean there isn't people out there paying for them as well. For example, if you take the realspanking studio that is very famous and where almost every video can be found for free on various websites, I have no doubt that this company is quite profitable as they seem to pay (saw a tweet from the owner of the website a few years ago about it when he was looking for new models) up to $500 per hour the actress that star in their videos.

That being said, it it true that there seem to be less high quality productions these days such as the videos produced by Lupus Pictures or Mood Pictures a few years ago and now most spanking videos seems to be fairly low budget which may be due to the fact that high quality stuff wasn't that profitable as more and more people watched them for free without paying.

Ive started writing this three times. Maybe this time will stick.

Believe it or not, the producers of content are usually the ones that submit content to tube videos. This is called "advertising" as the websites are not always as widely known or recognized. In cooperation with those companies, the tube website gets paid for hosting the videos especially if there are links to the home website. In compensation, the production website is alerted and allowed to have videos with "too much" content to be removed from the website.

Smaller websites that produce custom content as Goodgulf mentioned are more the victims of posted content. However tubes do recognize those copyright claims. The difficulty is the production website becoming aware of someone posting their content freely.

Yet, as Robertz said, the amount of people who get free stuff, doesn't completely overshadow the ability to make a buck from those who buy the memberships, etc.

SOME websites like bangbros are notorious for having poor business practices, like saying you can cancel memberships at any time, and provide security up the yingyang when signing up, but then when closing your acct, you have to go to a website hosted in France, where there is no security, then post your credit card number for all of the hackers of the world to see (half of which probably work for bangbros). All because they expect you to have a year long membership and don't say this, when you intended only a 3 to 6 month long membership.
Oh, and bangbros is based out of Florida where they have a chump clause on the books, which means the customer is NOT protected from being an idiot. Basically, It's like the "right to work" laws, except it's the right to take advantage of a fool who gives you all of their money. Companies that do this rationalize it as paybacks to those who get free stuff off the net, and they think EVERYBODY is guilty of that.

Believe it or not, I don't believe this.

The content creators that I referred to (including Realspankings, Shadowlane, Punished Brats) are some of the best known video producers out there. Whilst they might post short clips, trailers or snippets to SpankingTube, they aren't releasing whole videos in exchange for "advertising" on porn sites. Then there are the sites that post entire library's worth of videos stolen from various producers, which is certainly not advertising undertaken by the producers.

Content creators like Michael Masterson and Dallas are extremely vigilant in calling out stolen pictures on Fetlife, so I doubt they're secretly releasing their own videos to the tube sites for advertising. This topic is covered from time to time on the "Never too old for Agoodspankin" podcast, and each time the comment from the creator is that the stolen content is making their job increasingly difficult.

I've heard that at least one 'free tube site' had a business model that allegedly included getting one of their employees to sign up to smaller content producer's sites, download their entire catalogue, then post it on the 'free tube site'. The smaller content producer then had nothing to sell, as all their content was available for free, and was vulnerable to a take-over bid from the 'free tube site' - who thus gained the legal rights to show their content!

The 'free tube site' didn't make its money from 'content', but from selling advertising, using the 'content' just to attract viewers.