Porn performer Lena Paul took to twitter the other day to post a very long message to her co-workers. Below are her exact words … compeltely unedited.
CONTENT IS MORE PROFITABLE THAN PAID SCENES
CONTENT IS MORE PROFITABLE THAN PAID SCENES
CONTENT IS MORE PROFITABLE THAN PAID SCENES
CONTENT IS MORE PROFITABLE THAN PAID SCENES
CONTENT IS MORE PROFITABLE THAN PAID SCENES
CONTENT IS MORE PROFITABLE THAN PAID SCENES
Or rather if you’re only doing mainstream and not monetizing your own channels, I’m about to lovingly roast you because this is the only way others got my ass in gear about content (speaking of that Snapchat show coming tonight for all the lurkers that aren’t heauxs reading this)
Y’all will fuckin starve yourself and rinse your intestines out at 5am to show up for a scene for a dying studio that’s hemorrhaging money faster than you can type in http://pornhub.com but will cancel the same day on your content trade tf are you even doing?? Work smarter!!
Unless you’re one of the like 50 girls in a business of 3500+ that commands an above mkt avg scene rate or do 15+ scenes/mo, I guarantee you you will make more money over your lifetime from the labor you perform on sets where you get to monetize the content yourself afterwards.
Okay let’s break this down. Let’s say you’re paid $500 to do a bobo GG scene for a non-notable company (that’s not rate IK but I want a nice divisible number). You take your $500 and that’s one of your 5-10 scenes per month comprising your income. (Many girls don’t even get 5-10)
But I want to show the middle between girls struggling for bookings and girls doing okay. ANYWAY. You go to work for 6-8 hours and you get your $500, in a few weeks the scene comes out and your fan base goes “oh cool let me cop that.” Great right? WRONG. You just lost money beeb.
Let’s say instead you shot three 10-30 minute clips on that day and promo them through your channels, charging between $10-$30 for each clip. You’d need to sell one of those between 25-75x to be on par with doing a scene for that pro company. I wanna make sure you get this fully:
Say you have 10K followers on twitter (way low for a porn girl tbh), that means you need at most .075% of your fan base purchase 1 vid from that day to justify staying home and doing your own content. The beautiful thing though is that even after you’ve exhausted individual sales
You then have the ability to further monetize those hours of your time by putting it on subscription platforms like @OnlyFansApp or @AdultCentro and sharing it with tube platforms like @MVTubeOfficial or @pornhub premium, which continue to collect income for you passively.
So say you’re shooting 5x a month and making approx 5K a month doing that (female performer median is 60K annually). YOU ARE NOT ACTUALLY MAKING 5K.Immediately that hits your account and you gotta deduct—Agency fees (10-15%)Self employment taxes (30%, but really more like 25%)
So really you’re making $3K a month and trying to live on that in Los Angeles, 1 of the world’s most expensive cities. You did not put the inside of your fuckin colon on the internet to make barely above poverty wages (in LA, obviously that would go farther elsewhere don’t @ me)
Furthermore if you’re spending approximately 40-80 hours per month physically on a set in order to generate that $3K, conceptualize it like this: if you took another 40-80 hours and replicated that level of effort in your own content, you’d not only be AT MIN making at least that
But also continuing to profit off that labor via passive effort channels (sales and tube site marketing) — basically that content you made in 3 hours will be a money making ASSET for the rest of your life. The path to self sufficiency and financial independence is paved not with
Labor but with assets. This is late stage capitalism, people. We gotta start working like the 1% if we’re ever going to get ahead and get out of this rat race. The more content you assemble, it’s like investments (see my thread about investment), theyre like the worker bees that
Go out and continue to amass money for you. I’ve had no makeup morning sex with my husband and made more money off an hour of “work” (lol) than I have off of any scene that’s ever been released for a pro company. Did I get it all up front? No, but over time yes. Now multiply that
Go out and continue to amass money for you. I’ve had no makeup morning sex with my husband and made more money off an hour of “work” (lol) than I have off of any scene that’s ever been released for a pro company. Did I get it all up front? No, but over time yes. Now multiply that
By 100s of vids, cam shows and Snaps and you’re starting to see why girls are leaving full time pro porn shooting to be their own studio heads. The old school production pipeline has failed and now is the time for you to show viewers that supporting you directly is most ethical.
I’m not saying don’t do scenes for other companies (obv look at me) I’m saying that if you’re not satisfied with your income level and you’re not controlling your content, there’s a correlation there. You think because you put 5 vids up and did Snapchat for 2 wks and made $100
n a month and wonder why you’re not happy with your finances. This is a business. I get it girl, I’m a mess, I have school and work and family and it’s all kinds of nuts but this is why you hire an assistant! @Yippieskip/@SlamdogFilms rock and if you need content mgmt they’re
Get a manager. Work your social media. Read about SEO. Read the pornhub insights for trends on content, watch for patterns in what sells, read trade publications. Fucking hustle and believe in your own abilities to hold the attn and loyalty of your fan base with quality content.
You can do this! I believe in you! Stop giving power to studios who see you as a manipulable commodity. There’s all of about 10 studios that I would even classify as worth your time to shoot for anyway. Don’t stop shooting but watch your pro scenes skyrocket the more you produce.
Content=fuck you money. FU money=no studio or director ever being able to force you into doing something you don’t want to do bc you got the ability to fuck right off a set and not worry about if they blacklist you for enforcing boundaries. Content=safety, literally.
5 Responses
Lena has a point. I still think doing some scenes for traditional porn companies is necessary for you to get your name out there and probably to make the cash to buy equipment for self production but if you can come up with the money to buy good 4K commercial use camera equipment and an appropriate tripod ($2500-$4000, your phone camera won’t work for this nowadays although a consumer grade 4K video camera may work for a few months, those are about $1000 but don’t expect them to hold up to eight hours a day of use for very long), a i5 or i7 computer with the appropriate graphics card for editing (and camming, about $1000), an appropriate computer monitor ($300 or so), hiring a cameraman to shoot your scenes ($250 a day or so) pay other performers their rate ($500-$1500 per person) to fuck you for posting on Clips 4 Sale, Only Fans, Fan Centro, etc. you should do it. You also need to take into account the fees these sites charge for facilitating your scene distribution. If you can talk other performers into a “content trade” situation (a few will do that, especially for performers they are friendly with, your traditional scenes and networking at porn industry events will help this) that might also be a way to start out producing independently but you has to remember that your performer partner(s) in the scene also sell it and that reduces your revenue from it (and you still need $4000-$5500 for the appropriate equipment to even consider self-production). Obviously doing streaming “cam” scenes on an appropriate company’s website is also a way to make money (you still need the computer, monitor and camera) but your name somehow needs to be out there (that is where your traditional porn scenes come in) and you need to publicize your camming activity on Twitter or another appropriate medium to make it work. You also need an attractive looking, uncluttered space and appropriate furniture to film in — necessitating an extra bedroom or other large room set aside and furnished for camming and scene filming.
That sounds nice except many of these content videos are shit. Most are shaky cell phone videos. If the girl is going to shoot her own content she will have to invest some $$$ in a decent camera and lighting.
Karma, I agree that if I am paying $20 for a single scene I want it filmed with a decent camera and not a shaky cellphone camera. The shaky cellphone camera videos I see on YouTube (not a porn site, obviously) annoy the hell out of me!
Thing is, many of these manyvids/onlyfans girls won’t shoot with guys who are on those same platforms. The person who write for this site even tell girls not to shoot for clips4sale producers.
I was more thinking that the girls would produce their own C4S content with other people they know through traditional porn scene work. I think the person you are referring to is talking about shooting with people derisively called “guys with cameras” in the industry — poorly funded “producers” that don’t have any other connection to the industry and of which several have been warned about specifically by performer and sometimes legal name on this site in the past two or three months. Before the days of self-produced porn “guys with cameras” were warned about as well, C4S and the like just make it easier for them to get porn chicklets to do scenes with them (some of these people just want to fuck the girls and post to C4S type sites to justify to the cops that they are fucking for business and not just tricking them into being their hookers). A performer has to vet unknown producers no matter what medium they use but C4S makes it easier for unscrupulous people to become “producers” (go read about Khan Tusion and the directors at Anabolic/Diabolic, they are barely around nowadays but a Google search should bring plenty up for your perusal) and use that status to essentially trick unsuspecting porn chickies to fuck them and essentially creating a situation where a john tricks a porn performing chick into being their hooker for the evening (and the performer is likely paid less than she would as a escort or street prostitute as a result).
Also, this site has five main reporters filing articles for this site, they have very different views on industry issues and subjects. Even when Mike was running this site he had other reporters filing articles to be published here. A couple of reporters even had direct access where they didn’t have to go through Mike to publish on here. I think nowadays all non-owner articles are submitted to an editor for approval and publishing on this site but editorial staff (probably one person) doesn’t seem to be requiring a certain political expressed opinion to have articles published. Obviously for the site to break even financially some subject matter had to change (Mike paid for this site mainly from his own money with little advertising), I wish this wasn’t the case but I am not stupid and understand the necessity of the changes — hell, I was an accounting professor for fucks sake and was also a contract banking compliance officer for two relatively local credit unions in later years so I understand business very well. He/she is even allowing press releases to be published nowadays (I think he/she has found a happy medium between Mike’s policy of almost no press releases and publishing everything submitted), I don’t want to see this site awash in hundreds of press releases a month but picking two or three good PRs a week to publish is appropriate.