The early internet era was a Wild West of adult content experimentation. Cheap and discreet distribution tools made it easy for new players to get into porn, throw outlandish ideas at the wall, and make bank either off novelty or by tapping into previously obscure fetishes. Early streaming and chat tech opened the floodgates for everyday people to share their sexual peccadilloes with the world via amateur porn, and even rudimentary webcam shows.
A few insiders still operate within that innovate-and-profit paradigm: “If you want people to buy your porn, it’s simple,” argues porn and cam performer Kimber Haven. “Give them something they have never seen and can’t get for free” elsewhere.
But the rise of “tube” sites and easily accessible free porn over the past decade pulled the rug out from under the porn world, allegedly contributing to a drop in industry profits from (by some rough evaluations) about $12 billion annually in the aughts to about $5 billion by the mid-teens. Some insiders estimate that as few as one in 10,000 porn viewers actually pay for content now.
Simultaneously, the rise of freemium cam sites has made it easy for most viewers to watch or interact with models without ever paying a dime. The number of people trying to cam for cash has also grown much faster than paying audiences. As their profit pies shrink, most adult content creators feel pressure to move away from pure experimentation, passion projects, or even attempts to appeal to the broadest audiences.
SOME INSIDERS ESTIMATE THAT AS FEW AS ONE IN 10,000 PORN VIEWERS ACTUALLY PAY FOR CONTENT NOWInstead, they increasingly focus on figuring out — and catering to — who exactly still pays for adult content and “which demographics are the most profitable,” as indie performer and producer Meana Wolf puts it. Which means that big and regular spenders’ habits and desires increasingly influence what we see in porn, and as a result, what many of us think it’s normal to want or do.
Ironically the most visible, and arguably most successful, leader of this push in the traditional porn space is MindGeek, the notoriously opaque company that owns Pornhub and a number of other leading free porn tube sites — as well as a number of major porn production houses, like Brazzers and Digital Playground. They (and other multi-site networks, like Gamma Entertainment and WGCZ Holdings) collect troves of data on what their users watch and how they engage with it, then feed this data back to the content producers working within their networks. MindGeek did not respond to a request for comment from Vox, but researchers Chris Sprigman and Kal Raustiala spoke to MindGeek’s team about how they use their data to drive content creation for a 2018 paper. They found that the company often hands down scripts from on high that specify every detail of a scene, down to the color and style of clothing performers should wear.
Sprigman told me that MindGeek did not want to reveal exactly whom they tailor their content toward, or to what ends. (“The concern that they voiced to us,” he said, “was that they don’t want to be lumped in with Google, Facebook, etc. in the current panic about tech platforms” and their data usage.) Still, given that MindGeek has said in the past more than half of its revenue comes from people paying for accounts on its sites, Sprigman and others believe it’s likely they’re trying to create and promote content that will draw in viewers who are most likely to convert into paying subscribers.
Few networks, much less indie sites or performers producing their own content, have data as rich or analytic teams as robust as MindGeek. So many producers look to MindGeek to get a sense of how to attract paying porn viewers.
“Their reach has the power to create trends” across the industry, said Bree Mills, Gamma’s head of production. “Family role-play content” — i.e. simulated incest scenarios — “has dominated Pornhub’s popular results over the last five years, which has had a tremendous influence on the number of related scenes being produced to satisfy perceived demand.” Pure Taboo, one of the series Mills has helmed, features a ton of fauxcest scenes.
Even when producers don’t look to titans like MindGeek for guidance on profitable trends, they often focus on what they know about their current or ideal paid users to try to consolidate their hold over them. “My target customer is in his late 20s to mid-30s — old enough to probably have some spending money and young enough to still possibly be single,” noted performer and clip maker Jessica Starling. She makes sure her personal image and content reflects the sorts of things she has gleaned that this demographic is into, although that can be a moving target.
Performer-producer Lance Hart argues it’s so difficult to truly discern who buys porn, much less who doesn’t but might, that it’s hard to trust that even a firm like MindGeek has solid info on the subject, much less that it makes the right plays to draw in likely big spenders. “Ultimately, it’s still an art,” says Mills, “not a science.”
But regardless of their sophistication, tailoring efforts still effectively elevate some fetishes that may not actually be widely popular in a bid for profitability.
Custom videos, created to patrons’ specifications by small studios or adult performers who also produce their own content, are at times described like antidotes to data-driven porn. So are live cam shows, during which viewers can interact with models. Both offer people a chance to see exactly what they want, even if they’re not part of a big, juicy potential porn payer demographic. (They also offer the appeal of direct connection with an idealized figure, which is why so many personalized clips and cam shows focus on intimacy and emotional support over the sexual hydraulics that define porn, and some are entirely non-nude.)
Clip makers run the risk of making tiny fetishes seem larger than they are. Small groups with deep pockets may order tons of content suited to their unique tastes. When they allow producers to sell those clips to others as well in the hopes of making a few extra bucks, as often happens, they can functionally create a distortionary glut of hyper-niche fetish content. In one notable case, a single German man with a penchant for watching a man dressed in a swamp monster-style Halloween costume creep and grind on naked women ordered so many clips catering to his fetish that it created the impression this was actually a small but vibrant kink that many people held.
Cam platforms like LiveJasmin and Streamate focus on connecting viewers with models whose personas fit their interests. They then move customers into one-on-one private chat rooms where they pay for connection by the minute (and occasionally offer extra tips), which may lead to a truly bespoke experience. But folks seem increasingly drawn to freemium platforms, like Chaturbate and MyFreeCams, that let hundreds or even thousands of viewers sit in on a performer’s show for free, all interacting with each other and the model, occasionally sending tips and requesting specific acts.
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