THE SECRET ECONOMICS OF GAY PORN, OR ‘WHY GAY PORN BECAME SO VANILLA’

I got this email from a reader yesterday morning. It seemed worth answering.

When did porn get so vanilla?

For many years, porn sites have had “theme” categories to organize content. You could choose fetish themes like “cops” or “jocks” or “military” or “cowboys” or “leather” and find lots of content. If you built a site just with just the content from the past few years there’d only be one category: “naked white gym rats fucking”

Yes the guys are hot, but there is so little that sets one scene apart from another anymore. The theme and setting of a scene can crank the excitement up to 11. Just look at To The Last Man, a smoking hot cowboy themed movie from back when Raging Stallion made movies instead of just “naked white gym rat” scenes.

Did gay men somehow lose all sense of creativity? Or did the creative ones just stop making porn?

No. Maybe. Sort of. Here’s what happened.

It’s a little like Flowers for Algernon, isn’t it? In the first decade of internet porn, diversity flourished like the Breakfast Club: the jocks, the brains, the basket cases, the princesses, and the criminals. Heck, you even had people that weren’t white. Pretty sweet, right?

Then the bottom dropped out. I’ve written about it before, elsewhere, but I didn’t really touch on how it affected the content of the movies themselves. Here’s what happened:

DVD ECONOMICS
Studios used to make a hell of a lot more money per movie. Until about five years ago, a studios could sell a DVD for $69.95. That’s more than $15 per scene. (I know a lot of you didn’t buy actual DVDs, but studios were still making money buy selling to rental stores.) Until about 2007, it wasn’t all that strange to hear of a gay porn studio bragging about a production costing $250,000 or more — To the Last Man, Dangerous Liaisons, Cross Country. Five years ago, you might be able to make triple that back — now, you’d come out in debt.

You see, studios never made a ton of money online — it was just mad money. The people really making money off of internet porn were largely people like Randy Blue, Sean Cody and Corbin Fisher — companies that shot most of their movies (well, scenes) in the same bedroom. No dialogue. So when DVDs began to slow and studios had to adjust to online income, those fancy things had to go. Because membership to something like Falcon or Titan is $30 a month. And they’re expected to do two updates a week to be competitive. That works out to less than $4 per scene — more than a 75% drop in profit from the DVD days.

And that’s for people who are paying. Piracy and a lousy economy meant that people weren’t forking out money the way they used to. If you’re under 25, you might not remember how difficult it was to get your hand on porn, especially gay porn, before 2004. It wasn’t everywhere online. You had to go. You had to borrow. You had to pay. And that meant that studios could do bigger productions, rent impressive locations, buying uniforms and props. You know, Hollywood stuff.

With some exceptions here and there, like the Other Side of Aspen, that’s all gone.

BLOND AND BLAND
So how did that lead to Our United Nation of Gym Rats? Well, quite simply, of all the niches blond, bland and muscled sells the most copies. But in the new economy, vanilla is one of the few flavors that’s profitable. Five years ago, you could still fill a niche like leather or wrestling or Blatino in gay porn and have enough customers to make it worth your while. Someone like Tiger Tyson, who — let’s say — sold a fourth of what a blond, bland and muscled sold. He could make a profit because his productions were cheaper — even when he went to Paris. When the bottom fell out economically, the new normal for major studios meant $30K. And if a blond, bland muscle studio was shooting a feature for $30K, a niche producer would have to do it for $10K to be profitable. That’s not a business, that’s a hobby. So a lot of people who were doing more interesting, less profitable things left the business. (A lot of smaller producers also left when they felt they’d have to go bareback to compete in the new economy.)

Some niches are still profitable — but generally, because they’ve been able to consolidate or economies of scale. Take a studio like Kink — they have a massive production studio in San Francisco. They can afford to build an expensive set because that set will not only be used for, say, Bound Gods, it can also be used for Men On Edge. It can also be used for fetish sites, like Foot Worship. Or a straight sites, like Hogtied.

It’s similar with something Men.com, with all their different sites. Except instead of using a set five times for different sites, they rotate the same guy through each site. Think of porn studios like a Costco shopper — they get volume discounts. So if you can promise Tommy Defendi five scenes, you can get his per scene rate down.

THE NEW NORMAL?
You’ll notice that when studios do DO big features on location, they shoot closer to home or use local talent. In 2005, I went to Hawaii with Raging Stallion for a week to shoot a behind-the-scenes feature for Lords of the Jungle. They flew probably two dozen people out for the shoot. When we shot this, I was sitting pretty on the Big Island watching this from the side:

Now, if you look at a big location shoot it’s more likely to be somewhere driving distance, or they use talent that doesn’t need a plane ticket (say, Michael Lucas’ Men of Israel). It’s just a different world.

That’s not to say all is lost. Sites like NakedSword can aggregate other content and produce their own. They’re an important outlet for smaller producers who can’t reach a wide audience on their own. And sites like Staghomme still do creative stuff, because they don’t have to travel for exotic locations — they’re based there. Like every one else, gay porn studios are adapting to the new economy. And, I’ll say managing to produce some incredibly hot scenes week after week, and still with a stunning amount of variety. I have no problem finding hot sex — it just isn’t really shot in the Turkish desert.

Will the pendulum swing back? Will Hollywood return to 70mm? Probably not. But will people and studios eventually find a way to make creative, incredibly hot porn? Yes. I just hope it happens fast. I want to go back to Hawaii.

–Mike
Follow @mikestabile

Related:
The End of Porn’s Golden Age (via Salon)
Sneak Peak: To The Last Man