The State of the Porn Union 2014: Discussion

[The Insider]

I've been doing this a while and I'm curious as to what others think of this, midway thru 2014. Is the biz getting better worse, easier, harder etc.

From the end of the biz that i approach there was a time way before me where any shit that was thrown at the wall stuck & made $. As more and more people got into it the industry self refined itself. You could still make millions off of typo urls's with redirects but you couldn't get away with a sloppy site, you either had to teach yourself some chops or sell it to someone else based on your good domain. On the end of the providers you had everyone & their brother starting a "_______Cash" website promising massive returns on oh the traffic you sent.
This and another part I'll get to later are parts of the genesis of the massive suck that still exists in porn today.
There was so much blatant ripoff, sales shaving, fly by night operations, and some still remember the epassporte debacle.

The underlying tone, who gives a fuck/no fucks were given stupidity. The belief that there's always another dopey affiliate/model coming along any minute that we don't have do conduct ourselves like businesses
I always tested every site I signed up with and all except one shaved sales, complain about it? who gives a fuck, acct closed you lost all your commissions.
Too much of this biz is still conducted like some sleazy back room operation,
This is why it makes it hard for anyone to trust anyone in porn.

As evidenced on this forum, ask a few too many questions of a certain cam site & suddenly your acct is terminated.
It's that old "who gives a fuck, there's another model right behind her".
That I thought would be self refining seems to be amok.
Just today alone I witnessed a model peeing into a condom, thaen drinking it, rinse and repeat. Another after a fist foray into the back door emerge with trace fecal matter & lick it off.
Theres a silent voice in my head that's saying "holy fuck if there ever was a govt agency looking to horn their way into this & regulate it this is the stuff they'd look for.

And my impression of the model side (knowing a number of models as I do) is that there's the feeling if you are a fav you get away with anything and it's so easy if they want to term your acct & seize all your earnings. And what can you do about it? Who gives a fuck cause there's another model right behind her.

Shouldn't it be better by now?

I'm interested to hear others personal thoughts and opinions on it. Agree, disagree it doesn't matter

 

[Myriads]

I'll play.

There is no reason "it should be better" now.

Thanks to the stigma that adult services still hold in this oh so puritan on the outside, but decadent on the inside, culture of ours, things won't improve.

Employees in the sex service industry, have few protections under the law, and in fact are soften on the wrong side of it and can't ask for protections as a result. So they are exploited. Or they exploit themselves as hard as they can to grab as much cash as they can. Until society starts to see sex services as 'real' job paths, due protections, you'll not see much progress.

I manage a major fetish website community. We were the first major hub for a specific fetish on the web and we have 115K members, and growing every month. Fifteen years in now. Over time we've attracted the video and other media (art, publishers) producers who cater to the fetish, the models who work the fetish, the escorts that sell themselves in service of the fetish, and so forth. It's given me a real real close in look at one segment of the 'porn' industry, and also one on what it's like to manage and run a major web site that has constant posting, and god knows how many rule violations going down in gods know how many threads everyday. It gives me a unique perspective on MFC.

I know that MFC can't monitor all it's rooms. There are too many, for too many hours, with way way too few staff on at any moment to even see a fraction of them. Now for all I know all video sent gets banked and they can pull and review anything that passes server side after the fact, but that still means some member has to report a violation to the powers that be, and they have to have the time to look it up and act. So shit (quiet literally sometimes) will slide past.

MFC is going to rely on members to police. Which is about as uneven and ineffective moderation as you can get. But you also get what you pay for. And we also know that spending is not what a site of this nature will do as a first solution. So the problem will continue.

Now I'm sure there are reasons for every one of MFC's 'no-no' rules. I'm not sure how many of them are based in legal issues, or based in culture (I doubt it's illegal to broadcast a woman sleeping on a cam, but MFC continues to consider this a ban-able action) And if I remember right when MFC first started public shows with any kind of toy penetration were a no-no also. That sure got forgotten pretty fast. They wrote a rule that got ignored, and didn't have the resources or will to enforce it.

I'm not sure what would bring the Fed's knocking on the door. Minors for sure. Proven sex slavery? Yup. Beastiallity? No question. But past that I'm not sure. Things will keep getting pushed. And The site will either have to pony up moderator costs, or let it's rules drop one by one.

Porn by it's very nature is a medium that pushes every limit it can find. It seeps into business, art, culture. It eats things while you are not looking (Sears and Robuck was horrified to discover it's early catalogs were used for… "Impure activities" when they first included illustrations of women in period bloomers.) So I think that things will continue pretty much as they are.

The industry will always be cloudy so long as it's employees have to hide for the morality of the masses.

Oh and as a sad side note, regarding there always being a 'next model' On video producer once said to me, "Models willing got do this on film? They keep making more. The supply is endless of girls needing to make cash, and selling the only thing they have." That alone props up the biggest problems in the adult service industry.

On the bright side. I feel that camming has been one of the biggest steps forward for adult service providers ever. It provides a low entry cost, is pretty safe when placed next to other sex service jobs (stripping, hooking) and has done more to place control and power in the performers hands then ever before. It's one of the brightest, and most progressive lights in the adult service constellation.

Myriads

 

[Alexandra Cole]

On the bright side. I feel that camming has been one of the biggest steps forward for adult service providers ever. It provides a low entry cost, is pretty safe when placed next to other sex service jobs (stripping, hooking) and has done more to place control and power in the performers hands then ever before. It's one of the brightest, and most progressive lights in the adult service constellation.

I agree. This shift in control feels like a watershed moment to me.

 

[Alcon]

Unfortunately hetereosexual 'adult services' will never be 'progressive' so long as solely women providers are providing for solely men clientele. That doesn't mean it's wrong, but it's not progressive. Cam models do have more control and can enforce room behavior by banning users but the control is ultimately illusory because they still depend on the members to pay their bills and determine their success on the site(s). The customer is the one with the power, it's just like any other business. Only the difference is that in other businesses, your sex doesn't determine what end of the provider/buyer transaction you are on.

 

[LadyLuna]

Unfortunately hetereosexual 'adult services' will never be 'progressive' so long as solely women providers are providing for solely men clientele. That doesn't mean it's wrong, but it's not progressive. Cam models do have more control and can enforce room behavior by banning users but the control is ultimately illusory because they still depend on the members to pay their bills and determine their success on the site(s). The customer is the one with the power, it's just like any other business. Only the difference is that in other businesses, your sex doesn't determine what end of the provider/buyer transaction you are on.

There are men camming for men. There are women paying for camgirls. I'm pretty sure there are also a few women paying for cam-men. So I don't understand your point.

Is your point that more women should pay for porn? Are you suggesting women should be forced to pay for a service they don't want?

 

[goldenaye666]

So many thoughts and directions to go in... Being involved in the industry as a cam site moderator and an affiliate advertiser for a few years now, I'm even more skeptical than I was as just a fan of adult entertainment. I don't like how much information I have to give to sites to sign up as an advertiser. I'm never sure I get paid everything I should be. I end up just thinking: Fuck it, I'm not going to worry about it as long as I'm receiving enough to get by. There are several models and webmasters I call friends, and I know some of them even don't do things in an honest or reasonable manner. I'd love to make it a full time job & career, but don't think I can ever really rely on it for sure. Especially when perceptions about the adult industry even have some banks closing accounts of adult workers. Some of the affiliate programs have their companies named things that sound like a porn company and put that on their checks, increasing the chances I could have a banking problem.

But I have 2 other more socially acceptable jobs too I go out into the physical World to do, and there are problems with people at those too. Every industry has its assholes, liars, scam artists, and other miscreants. The adult industry isn't necessarily full of more shady people than other industries. It is just much more difficult to keep track of them due to the anonymity involved. Webmasters & models can change their screen names, urls, etc... and start over cheaper & faster than a business with a physical location; and with a lot of people not knowing who they are and what they've done before. All the problems seem to be more of a representation of society as a whole. People are the flawed, and technology is flawed. The benefits technology brings making many things easier and more convenient, provide those same benefits to people who seek to commit malicious acts against others. Just increasing the problems in the adult industry which has shifted to being primarily an Internet industry.

When you get to the webcam industry specifically, it does allow easier entry & some more physical safety for performers. But it has all the technological drawbacks. Hackers, cyber stalkers, and less financial safety. Rather than getting cash that day like many models & strippers, you're relying on getting paid later from many sites who deal in too much volume to bother providing decent customer or employee support. Models on cam sites get fined, suspended, or terminated all the time. It can even be for something they didn't even do. I know a model who got suspended from a popular cam site, because someone in her chat was flooding the room with spam. Someone reported it to the site's customer support that she was the one doing the spamming. They suspended her without even checking the chat log, or telling her why until afterwards when she emailed them to ask. She had to miss multiple days of work until the site actually checked, realized they screwed up, and responded back to her. It isn't the most reliable system.
Its not great financially for many customers either. The webcam industry costs more for consumers. Rather than just spending $20 - $30 on a porn DVD or month-long website subscription, there's a lot of people spending that much for a 5-minute cam show. A lot of models who used to have their own websites producing content, have quit in order to go work on cam sites hoping they'll make it big that way. It makes me wonder for every top webcam model making a killing, what percentage of her customers now have a large amount of debt? And what the impact of this shift has on society as a whole? I'm inclined to think its not a good one, even though I am a fan and participant in the industry.