The Fall of San Fernando Valley PART II: The Rise of Custom Porn
By: Ben Van Alboom
Tags: Pornography, Sex, Sex Work, Internet Porn, Filmmaking

Dan is still bustling with energy, though he admits he is already thinking about a next project — for an Oregon customer who likes lo-fi technology and builds his own contraptions.

“We’ve already done a video for him with women wearing self-made VR goggles through which they saw themselves walking from above. To this day, I have no idea what that was about. But the guy was happy with the result, and now he has developed buttplugs and vaginal eggs that vibrate in response to a theremin (a bizarre electronic instrument that’s operated by moving hands towards antennas, ed). We are shooting that one next week with three actors — two men and a woman — and a theremin player. It’ll be wild!”

His eyes sparkle yet again, and it’s easy to imagine why — who doesn’t want to see that?! But Dan tells me not to get my hopes up. “There is little chance that you will ever get to see that one. The client paid extra to keep it for himself. Sorry, dude.”

WHOREARCHY

The second shoot of the day does not last all that long either, and like Dan and Rhiannon, Ella Nova looks happy with how it went.

“Though I probably won’t ever look at the result,” she confides in me. “I rarely do. At most, I’ll check out the trailer. I’m extremely self-critical, so it’s very unpleasant to watch a movie in which the camera is pointed at you almost every single second. One unflattering shot and I might be too self-conscious on my next shoot. As a porn actor, that is something you want to avoid. You want it to look real and authentic — even if it is all make-believe. And sex doesn’t look real or authentic when you are clearly showing more interest in your abs than in the person you are doing it with.”

// Ella Nova © Emily Berl

Ella Nova is one of many porn stars who, in recent years, has rolled in the industry through webcamming — besides customs, by far the biggest revolution in pornography.

It’s a pretty simple concept: all you need is a computer, a decent webcam, and a good internet provider. If you’ve got all that, sign up to websites like Chaturbate or LiveJasmin — both are in the top fifty of most popular sites in the US — and start earning tokens right away. Tips, basically. The more people enjoy your channel, the more tips you’re bound to receive, and the more visitors will be inclined to come back or even request a private session — where the real money is.

“When I started about ten years ago,” says Nova’s colleague Ela Darling, “most of those sites already existed, but no one gave them much thought. The technology was not all there, and most people didn’t have enough broadband to stream that much video. Back then, porn producers and DVD distributors occupied almost every square foot at big adult entertainment conventions. At the last AVN Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas, though, they had almost completely been replaced by cam sites.”

The porn industry has never been forthcoming with numbers. Still, according to professor and author Kassia Wassick, porn is a 97-billion-dollar industry globally, and by next year, webcam companies alone should make a hefty ten billion dollars annually.

Half of that sum will go to the companies behind those cam sites, while banks will also pick up at least ten percent — many financial institutions do not want to be associated with porn, and those who do tend to overcharge. What remains is for the performers.

That sounds like a really bad deal, though four billion dollars is, of course, still an impressive number.

“A popular webcam star recently showed me what she makes a month,” says Don Parret, the former editor-in-chief of porn trade journal XBIZ. “Fifty thousand dollars!” Parret did add that she was working fifteen hours a day and that she was featured on the homepage of a well-known cam site.

“It is a competitive system,” explains Parret. “The most popular stars are on the homepage, where the rest is trying to make their way to. The hopeless cases can be found on the last page of those sites. What do they make? No idea.”