Back before monthly subscriptions took over and free tube sites flooded the web, porn operated on a very different business model: pay-per-minute.
Not to be confused with pay-per-view, which usually meant coughing up for a full-length film, whether you finished it or not… pay-per-minute let you stream exactly what you wanted, for as long as you wanted, and billed you down to the second.
I remember this prehistoric existence quite vividly. One minute you’re watching a blowjob, the next your balance hits zero and you’re staring at a frozen screen with your pants down.
While pay-per-minute porn still exists today, it feels like a relic. Buried beneath a sea of all-you-can-eat subscriptions, the old-school meter-ticking model has been quietly edged out by binge-friendly platforms (and a crap ton of free content).
Here’s how that happened, and why.
How Pay-Per-Minute Porn Became Popular
Pay-per-minute porn was exactly what it sounds like: X-rated video on demand where you paid for every minute you watched.
So instead of paying per DVD or a monthly membership, you’d buy, say, 100 minutes of viewing credit and spend them however you liked… jumping between scenes, fast-forwarding to the good parts, trying to fap one out as efficiently as possible.
This highly lucrative system (for the porn companies!) was pioneered around the late ’90s by sites like AEBN (Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network) and soon became a standard way to consume online porn.
How it worked was pretty simple:
- You’d create an account
- Purchase a block of minutes by credit or debit card
- Each minute of playback would deduct a certain number of credits
- Spend tops when you stop watching
Note: It wasn’t always the case that 1 minute = 1 credit. Remember how Blockbuster would always charge more for premium new releases? The same applied to PPM porn. Hot bestsellers might command a premium, 2 credits per minute, 3 credits per minute, and so on.
As one exec bragged back in 2006, “typical online customers stay on about half an hour, paying 10 cents per minute, less than a cup of coffee”.
And indeed, $3 for 30 minutes of hard-to-find porn wasn’t a bad deal in those days. Unfortunately for said exec (and many others), inflation and massive supply has royally boned the formula!
The Earliest On-Demand Theatres
Sites like AEBN (still operational today) sparked a trend by setting up online “theaters.”
You’d browse a massive catalog of adult films (often tens of thousands of titles across all genres). And as part of the service, you could watch full movies or just individual scenes on demand, something close to a la carte freedom for the picky pervert.
Why pay for a whole DVD or join a site when you only cared about that one specific scene, right?
PPM let you skip straight to the money-shot – literally paying only for the minutes you viewed.
Crucially, there were no recurring charges. You topped up your minutes when you wanted, and if you didn’t use them, no monthly bill. No weird monthly charges to explain to the missus… except the occasional one-off payments to ambiguously-named CA based companies!
In the earliest days of adult VOD services, I remember becoming a master of the 2-minute preview. Many sites offered a quick free teaser where you could sample the tiniest hit of hardcore action before they’d ask for payment.
Friends confessed to frantically fast-forwarding through plot (who needs dialogue, right?) to find the “action” and minimize minutes spent.
It turned porn watching into a strategic sport: how many orgasms per credit could you squeeze out before the screen cut out?
Oh yes, boys, it was a different world before the tube sites…
Tech Limitations and Bandwidth Hogging
Technologically speaking, pay-per-minute emerged when streaming video was still relatively new and bandwidth was limited.
In 1999, when AEBN launched, broadband was rare and streaming quality was terrible. Bit rates and buffer just couldn’t hold a candle to the modern porn viewing experience.
“When we started, we were capturing movies from VHS tapes — and many looked and sounded pretty bad” recalls Jerry Anders of AEBN to XBIZ. “Also, back then, we were only streaming 512k files at the highest. Fast forward 12 years, so to speak—and now, we are streaming and selling up to 6000k files in true HD.“
Under those constraints, downloading entire films was impractical.
It was better to stream small portions on the fly… and the only choice if you were in a hurry.
This is a time when the porn pirates would spend hours downloading a single 3 minute clip on Kazaa or Limewire.
PPM was the perfect solution: watch bits at a time without huge downloads, ideal for the era of 56k modems.
As connections improved, the PPM platforms upgraded, but the pay-for-what-you-watch model remained the same… for better or worse.
These days, you can still pay by the minute on AEBN, but I can’t imagine you would think twice about how that content gets delivered. We expect the process to be as seamless as Tap Play and Fap, and it is.
Who Were The Pioneers of Pay-Per-Minute Porn?
Of course, no discussion of pay-per-minute porn royalty can start anywhere but AEBN.
It’s the true OG of PPM
AEBN
Founded in 1999 by Scott Coffman, AEBN essentially invented the adult VOD market.
Coffman had a wild idea: “One day, you’ll be able to watch movies on your computer, and people will pay us by the minute to do it”.
A lot of people called him crazy (and it’s funny how we’ve come a full circle!), but he proved them wrong in the years that followed…
By the mid-2000s, AEBN had become “one of the industry’s most widely recognized models for streaming adult content, boasting millions of pay-per-view users,” according to AVN magazine.
AEBN’s platform aggregated content from tons of studios. By 2011, they offered over 100,000 titles from 1,500+ studios. When we last reviewed their service, the number had risen to 125,000+ DVDs with 578,635 scenes.
They popularized the pay-per-minute “minute bundles” and also introduced options like 24-hour rentals or downloads for those who preferred fixed prices.
Through it all, minute-by-minute streaming was their bread and butter.
Hot Movies
Hot on AEBN’s heels was HotMovies.com.
Launched in the early 2000s, HotMovies became AEBN’s biggest competitor in the PPM arena. The two sites had similar concepts – huge catalogs of scenes from various studios, purchasable by the minute or via rental.
HotMovies was known for aggressive promotions: “20 Free Minutes” for new users was a common lure, and it helped to draw in frantic freeloaders with an eye for fap efficiency.
By pricing minutes cheaply and running sales, HotMovies built a loyal following, of budget-conscious wankers (hi, yes, me again). At its peak, it was the go-to alternative to AEBN… slightly more old-school in its interface, but stacked with obscure scenes you’d struggle to find elsewhere.
In recent years, it’s become something of a ghost ship. The original HotMovies platform is still online, but the parent company behind it has quietly shifted gears. If you’ve poked around lately, you might’ve noticed the whole thing feels like a white-labeled version of Adult Empire, or at the very least, part of the same overarching infrastructure.
They still sell minutes, but many of the storefronts are clearly powered by the same backend, and Adult Empire has become the bigger brand name in recent years…
Adult DVD Empire (Now Just Adult Empire)
While AEBN and HotMovies were duking it out in the early 2000s, Adult Empire (known as Adult DVD Empire back then) was busy slinging DVDs like Blockbuster’s deranged cousin.
And a mighty profitable business it was, too…
Just like Netflix pivoted to streaming from DVD rentals, by the mid-2010s, Adult Empire had seen the same writing on the wall. It pivoted hard into streaming — and today they’re one of the most polished adult VOD platforms on the internet.
Unlike the pure PPM sites, Adult Empire mixes models. You can pay-per-minute, buy lifetime access to individual scenes, rent them for 48 hours, or even bundle credits into a hybrid watch/download system.
AEBN deserves credit for popularizing PPM, but I would argue that Adult Empire had stolen that mantle long before the wheels started falling off.
NakedSword
On the gay side of things, NakedSword.com was the name to know.
NakedSword launched around 1999 as well and became the premier gay VOD site, offering a massive library of gay porn on a PPM basis. They were so successful that in 2007 AEBN merged with NakedSword, giving AEBN a “windfall of gay content” from premium studios like COLT and Falcon.
This merger was an early signal of how PPM platforms would soon consolidate to strengthen catalogs. AEBN’s CEO noted that bringing in NakedSword’s expertise and brand helped AEBN “stay relevant in the gay market”.
Even after the merger, NakedSword continued to operate as a distinct site, but it shared the minute-based library with AEBN.
However, if we look at their homepage today, the voice of the consumer speaks loud and clear:
Every modern porn service wants to be known as the Netflix of Porn.
Because every porn consumer expects all-he-can-eat… for a single flat fee.
And therein lies the answer for: why did the pay-per-minute porn industry go south?
Why Pay‑Per‑Minute Made Sense (Until It Didn’t)
During its golden era (roughly 2000–2007), pay-per-minute porn thrived because it solved a bunch of problems that were unique to that time.
Those problems are largely a relic… we don’t have to worry about them anymore.
- Broadband Limitations: In the early 2000s, streaming a full high-quality video was a painful affair. Most of us were on slow DSL or early cable internet. Buffering was a bonerkill. Getting off took forever. I’m pretty sure edging was born on Kazaa. 😂
- Cost and Credit Control: PPM was cheaper upfront for casual porn viewing. If you were only in the mood a few times a month, why pay $30 for a monthly membership? You could spend $10 and get, say, 100 minutes to use whenever.
- Scene Skimming and Selection: Let’s be real, pay-per-minute was built for cherry-pickers. The sites would usually let you click directly into individual scenes or segments for maximum efficiency.
- Huge Libraries = One-Stop Shop: We’re coming a full circle now, but back then, a major strength of the PPM platforms was aggregation and choice. They hosted everybody’s content (licensed legitimately). Beyond these platforms, it was incredibly difficult to source piecemeal scenes… without resorting to pirating. (So most of us did that too lol).
All told, pay-per-minute porn in its heyday was pretty damn user-friendly and innovative given the technological and market context.
You knew what you were getting, you knew how much you were paying, and if you blew your load (and your budget) too soon… well, that was on you.
But then the internet grew up.
Streaming got faster, tube sites exploded, and porn subscriptions started offering 10,000+ scenes for the price of a sandwich. Suddenly, those 100 minutes you paid for on AEBN didn’t feel like a smart way to stretch your cash.
The biggest difference is that, today, nobody wants to be timing their climax to a countdown.
We’d rather loop the same 15 second clip forever on a shorts or GIFS site. It’s why we have sites like RedGIFS – porn for the modern attention span.
Slow Decline: Tube Sites and Subscriptions Take Over
So when did it all start to go so badly wrong for the PPM sites?
Well, let’s set the stage: it’s 2007.
You’re happily burning minutes on HotMovies, blissfully unaware that elsewhere on the internet, a revolution is brewing.
A little site called YouPorn (launched mid-2006) is gaining traction by offering user-uploaded porn videos for free, YouTube-style. Users love it, so much so that it takes several months to keep the site online under ever-increasing loads of traffic.
Anybody remember bumping into this quaint little notice?
They weren’t joking.
By 2008, names like Pornhub, RedTube, and XVideos are exploding in popularity.
Suddenly, thousands of full-length porn scenes… many pirated from the very studios that fed AEBN/HotMovies … are available gratis. The tube era has arrived, and there’s no going back.
The fallout hits the pay-per-minute industry like a ton of bricks.
For consumers, the tubes were like stumbling into an all-you-can-eat buffet after years of paying per dish.
Sure, the buffet food might be lower quality or lukewarm, but it’s free and you can gorge endlessly. Traffic to tube sites skyrocketed, while many pay sites saw their growth stall or decline.
The PPM companies didn’t just roll over and die, though. In a twist of irony, AEBN itself launched a tube site in 2006: PornoTube.com.
We can only assume the idea was to stay relevant and maybe use the tube as a funnel – e.g. tease viewers with free clips on PornoTube, then upsell them to the paid AEBN theater for the full scenes.
But it didn’t halt the carnage.
Tube sites fundamentally changed user expectations.
Why pay even 10 cents a minute when you could watch a somewhat crappy version of the scene for nothing on a tube?
The value proposition of PPM – high quality, reliable streaming, huge catalog – started to weaken as tubes improved.
And by the early 2010s, tubes were offering better video quality and enormous amounts of pirated content, including entire DVDs. While studios and regulators successfully pushed back, famously forcing Pornhub to delete an enormous amount of unverified user-uploaded content, user behaviors had already been shaped.
Another big factor in the fall of PPM was the emergence of subscription-based “network” sites.
Instead of one studio = one site, companies began bundling multiple sites into one price, a smart consolidation play that is accelerating into 2025.
For example, by the 2010s you had products like the Brazzers Network (one fee for dozens of sites), or Aylo’s “Pornhub Premium” (launched mid-2010s as a kind of hybrid – pay monthly to access HD versions of tube vids and exclusive content). I believe they’ve rebranded it as SpiceVids to get away from the connotations of “free”. but the product is largely the same.
More recently, in 2019, Gamma Entertainment launched Adult Time, explicitly marketed as the “Netflix of Porn” – one subscription for a vast library spanning many genres and studios.
We’ve made it clear that we’re huge fans of Adult Time here on AdultVisor. And plenty of porn fans are continuing to vote with their wallets.
The bottom line is that if a porn enthusiast watches a lot of videos per month, a flat $10–$20 subscription is a far better deal than PPM. Especially if he invests it in a smart modern streaming platform with algorithms designed to surface even more of the content he loves.
The PPM Giants Respond
Faced with an existential crisis, many of the original PPM giants had a decision to make: adapt or die.
Adapt many did.
Adult Empire was one of the first major players to react with something that looked suspiciously like waving a white flag to the binge brigade: they rolled out an Unlimited Streaming plan.
Instead of paying per minute, you could now pay monthly for all-you-can-watch access to a curated library of premium titles. Sure, the unlimited catalog didn’t include everything… newer blockbusters and ultra-niche content were still gated behind pay-per-minute or rental, but for the average viewer, it scratched the itch.
It felt modern. It felt fair. And crucially, it felt like what users had grown used to on tube sites, and the never ending list of sites claiming to be the Netflix of Porn.
If you go to their site today, Unlimited is front and center of their marketing pitch.
Meanwhile, AEBN has doubled down on its long-tail VOD empire, but not without some major tweaks. In addition to maintaining their traditional minute bundles, they’ve introduced X-PASS — a hybrid monthly plan offering unlimited streaming, but only from selected studios.
Time will tell whether the ‘half embrace’ will really work.
They’d clearly love to keep the power users around by offering a subscription within the pay-per-minute ecosystem, instead of ditching it altogether.
Power users?
Yes, for all the doom and gloom, there’s a small sub-section of the porn market that STILL relies on pay-per-minute porn.
Where PPM Porn Lives On
So… who the hell is still watching porn by the minute in 2025?
Surprisingly: more people than you’d think.
Not millions, sure — but enough to keep the lights on at the smattering of longtail VOD sites that refuse to buckle.
1. Through Porn Historians & Vintage Hunters
This one’s a no-brainer. If you’re trying to find Debbie Does Dallas in full DVD glory — not the bootleg 360p version uploaded by “hornyhusband54” on some Eastern European tube — you’ll end up on a pay-per-minute platform.
Sites like AEBN and Adult Empire have archival-level libraries, with thousands of scenes from the 70s, 80s, and 90s that were digitized directly from VHS or film reels.
For vintage porn fans, it’s not the only game in town, but it’s by far the most popular.
2. Through Niche Fetishists
Tube sites may be endless, but you could argue they’re also increasingly sanitized. Many restrict extreme content, hardcore fetishes, or niche kinks that don’t fit the mainstream algorithm.
PPM platforms still (mostly) play ball with fully tagged categories for everything from balloon popping to burping JOIs. And since most of the scenes come from specialist studios, you’re paying for content that was made with fetishists in mind, not just repurposed tube clips.
3. One-Off Viewers & “Ethical” Porn Fans
You’ll also find a handful of users who treat PPM sites as the ethical alternative to free tubes. Reddit’s full of users who say they “don’t mind dropping $10 a month on AEBN” because it supports the studios and pays the performers.
Well, we could debate the numbers there, but in the absence of a Buy Me A Coffee link under each video, I guess it makes sense!
A Goodbye… But Not A Funeral?
Pay-per-minute porn might not be dead, but it’s definitely been put out to pasture.
Once the crown jewel of the entire porn industry, it’s now more like a vintage jukebox tucked in the corner of a porn bar no one remembers walking into. I certainly would not be investing in a per-minute based porn company in 2025.
That said, the model still deserves some respect on the name.
PPM walked so streaming porn could run.
It introduced ideas we now take for granted: precision viewing, scene-level access, “ethical” microtransactions, no-commitment viewing. Plus it beat the shit out of pay-per-view.
And in many ways, I’d argue it foreshadowed what OnlyFans and Clips4Sale would later double down on — giving users control over exactly what they pay for, and when.
Today, most of us would rather stream endlessly, loop short clips, or binge a full scene without watching our balance tick away like a pornified parking meter.
But it’s worth remembering there was a time … not that long ago … when every second of your jerk session literally cost you.
