hile there have been a handful of silver linings accompanying COVID — rethinking our relationship to work, a slower, more thoughtful pace to our lives — the adult entertainment industry may be deriving the most positivity from the pandemic. 

Between the dawning ubiquity of premiums and the collapse of boundaries between fans and performers via social media, COVID 19 has revealed a profound opportunity to transform porn’s business model and revolutionize our collective conceptions about gender and race that surround this type of content. As the year ends and the world finally approaches a transition period out of this crisis, it remains to be seen whether these pandemic-driven changes will endure, but those in the industry remain hopeful.

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The Free Speech Coalition — the national trade association for the adult industry in America — hosted a public Zoom webinar in the last days of September sponsored by Xhamster on how to produce adult content from home: “Shooting Like a Studio on an Amateur Budget.” 

Four panelists spoke for over an hour about the technical details of producing professional-looking films: Lighting, shooting setups, sound equipment, tripods, cameras, webcams, editing programs, and trending platforms were some of the topics tackled.

In addition to serving as a reminder of the Herculean amount of codification and preparation that goes into the production of adult content, the webinar sent a clear message: professional pornography can be produced at home. 

In fact, professional performers are already doing so.

COVID forced most entertainment industries — and the adult industry is no exception — to move indoors. The FSC called for a voluntary shutdown of porn productions in March, and shooting studios in California suspended their activities soon thereafter only to recommence in late June with a slew of cautionary guidelines.

With studios shuttered and a swiftly growing, global demand for pornography during the quarantine, performers had to reconsider some of their strategies.

In 2019, Pornhub — one of the biggest tubes for adult content in the world — received a total of 42 billion visits and approximately 115 million visits per day. According to the company's annual year-in-review, more than 6.83 million videos were uploaded in 2019 to the platform, which translates into 169 years of new content. 

Only three months later — in March of course — the platform experienced a 24% increase in traffic. Even as late as June, as some countries were slowly reopening their economies, the platform still reported a 19% increase in traffic worldwide compared to an average day before the pandemic. 

Impressive as it was, the exponential growth in web traffic of tubes like Pornhub was not the only highlight of the quarantine period, at least not from the eyes of adult performers and producers. 

Most of them were eyeing the rise of the so-called Premiums.

Premiums are platforms in which users can engage directly with influencers and buy subscriptions to obtain all kinds of exclusive content, from personalized fitness instruction to chef’s recipes and, yes, adult performers. The user interface is similar to popular apps like Instagram, but access to content is only granted through a paywall. These platforms experienced a huge demand for pornography during the quarantine and quickly became a source of income for performers working from home.

Data on “Interest over time” obtained from Google trends show a rising trend in the global interest around a search term like “Only Fans” (one of the most popular premium platforms in the world) whose starting point seems to correspond with the time where most countries around the world were announcing stay-at-home orders.

“There's a lot of really great resources out there for us”, says Lisey Sweet, an American performer. “Platforms such as OnlyFans and Avian stars allow us to get subscribers and we make our content so it's a really great way to make money and be your own boss and be able to do it however you decide that you want to do it.”

When thinking about the adult industry, websites like Pornub or Xvideos come to mind, and while they are big players, they are not the only platforms where users can access adult content. Twitter, Snapchat Premium, Instagram, OnlyFans, FanCentro, Xhamster, Cameo (for personalized video messages), SextPanther (texting App), Skype, and even Amazon Wish Lists are all part of the wide repertory of apps that performers use, some of which allow them to share self-made content with specific sectors of their fanbase. 

In this way, performers were not exactly new to the idea of shooting from home when Covid started, but like with every workforce, working from home brought a slew of new challenges. 

“Many people mistakenly think that this is an easy job,” says Kat Revenga, the VP of Marketing and Events for FanCentro, a subscription-based platform for adult content. 

“You may think that it is easy to undress, but that is not all there is to it. You have to know about digital marketing, you need some money to do mediavine, you have to create your own content. There are lots of financial things to consider. In the end, you are running your own business.”

The pandemic not only changed the location of shootings, but also additional roles within the industry. Before COVID, studio work was typically the main source of income for performers in mainstream porn, but with studios closed and platforms like OnlyFans gaining traffic, some performers decided to move into different means of production.

Performers have not only begun filming themselves at home, but they’re writing their own scripts and editing their own videos.

Instead of giving rise to new platforms, COVID has encouraged performers to engage their followers in new ways using the existing infrastructure and to create new partnerships with studios. Ms. Sweet used to work in a vaccine lab back in 2016 and is quite aware of the health risks of COVID. 

“A lot of companies are actually contracting out to people like me who produce their own stuff to make scenes for them,” she says. “So we’ll shoot in our own home and then they buy the scene from us.”

As California entered its strictest lockdown yet in early December, heading to the studio for a shoot persists as a dangerous and unlikely scenario in the near future.

While the Performer Availability Screening Service (PASS) offered by the FSC makes it easier for performers who are part of the program to take the Covid test, it is still a time-consuming process. LA authorities, where most studios are based, also offer the test for free for their citizens, but results usually take longer. 

Performers who had gone back to the studio while the stay-at-home order was lifted needed to get tested for COVID more frequently than they did for STIs. And while some studios will pay for the test, many performers have shouldered the cost of rapid testing.

From the performers’ and producers’ perspective, the industry is experiencing a profound shift that could result in a brand new business model. Between the boom of premiums, the advance of technology and recording devices, the blossoming of new platforms, and of course, the enduring pandemic, the adult industry is pleasantly reeling from this unprecedented autonomy.

“Performers [now] have more control than they’ve ever had before,” says Mike Stabile, Director of Communications for the FSC. “I would say that 50 or 60% of performers have not returned to work. They are creating platforms like OnlyFans and FansCentro. They are making clips and some custom material. There's lots of different ways for them to make money, and that's a good thing.”

The whole idea behind this subscription-based platform (the premiums) is to offer users a personal connection with performers and influencers; performers might share private videos, longer versions of public ones, personal stories, behind the scenes footage, or engage in direct messaging or private live streamings. 

“Fans get to see the person itself,” adds Ms. Revenga from FanCentro.

“They see the influencer in social media and say, ‘this is a person’. They get to see their life as it is. The performer, from the fans’ perspective, becomes not just a woman as an object, but a woman who can also enjoy sex. It’s a really different view than what we had before.”

FanCentro, for instance, has currently nearly 260k registered influencer accounts. Their model signups increased by 83.1% when comparing the last week of February with the last week of March and the time spent by users on the platform increased by 25% compared to the first months of the year. March saw a 183% increase in the average number of fans that follow a profile. 

Different services have also come up with education programs to get performers primed for the world of Premiums and self-created content.  Both Xhamster’s Creator Program and FansCentro’s recently launched Centro University claim to provide the basic tools for anyone to pioneer into the adult industry outside from the conventional studio-work business model. 

As performers figure out ways to eliminate intermediaries and get a grip on their content, they’re also gaining newfound power as they shape the consumption behaviors of their fans and their beliefs about pornography. This seachange in performer-created content will help underpin the vital structural changes the industry and society need in its relationship to adult content.

Porn has long struggled with moral accusations about the effects of sexually explicit content on its viewers and of the depictions and stereotypes that the industry passively — or actively — promotes. 

The dialogue around the appropriateness of porn and its psychological effects is a complicated and for the foreseeable future, never-ending conundrum calling into question everything from bodily autonomy and ethical finance, to the fostering of unrealistic sex expectations for burgeoning youth. 

The recent protests against racism have highlighted the not-so-latent moral questions at the core of the adult and other entertainment industries.

In light of the anti-racism protest in America, many performers have expressed their support for the Black Lives Matter movement and have raised concerns about the issue of structural racism within the making and distribution of pornography.

This past July, the FSC shared on their webpage a Change.org petition to “Stop fetishizing darkness. End racism in porn”. Allegations about unequal compensations among performers because of race and the reinforcement of stereotypes are certainly not new to porn, but many performers believe the current momentum behind antiracism movements will force the adult industry’s complicity in racism to endure a much-needed overhaul.

“I actually think that our industry has a very large social responsibility to address this,” says Sweet. “Let's say I might be booked for a scene with an African American guy. I might get paid more for it. I think that oftentimes that added payment was because it was considered more hardcore. But you look at it now and you say, ‘that's really messed up.’”

In a paper published in Archives of Sexual Behavior — Gender, Race, and Aggression in Mainstream Pornography — the authors analyzed a sample of 172 porn videos and coding for aggressive depictions: 

“We found that Black and Latino men were more likely to use aggression compared with White men. This finding is in line with the common media portrayal and public image of Black and Latino men as sexual beasts — violent and hypersexualized. Such representations affect public opinion and the stereotypical images of black and Latino men.” 

Black female performers, however, “were the least likely group of women to suffer from non-consensual aggression and were also more likely to be recipients of affectionate acts from either White or Black male partners.” 

Another study from 2020 — Worse Than Objects: The Depiction of Black Women and Men and Their Sexual Relationship in Pornography — echoes some of the depictions of black male performers, but reveals different results for females: 

“Overall, the results from our analysis suggest there are damaging stereotypical portrayals of Black women and men in pornography. Black women are more often depicted as the target of aggression, while Black men were portrayed more often as the perpetrators of aggression.”

The existence of aggressive content or racially-charged rape fantasies is not necessarily the problem per se; the more pressing question is whether its existence corresponds to the real interests and beliefs of citizens regarding race and gender. 

Adult content, as diverse as it is, is an entertainment industry at the end of the day, and its content is reflective of its audience’s deepest values and beliefs. 

“As long as we over-sexualize black people, as long as the culture at large engages in these stereotypes, specifically sexual stereotypes, there will always be producers who will try to capitalize on that,” says Stabile. “We really have a lot of work to do.”

Despite persisting problems and a general scrambling across the industry to rapidly evolve, Stabile believes structural changes are coming.

“I think that it has been a difficult time for everyone,” she says, “but the flowers are really coming out of COVID with power and a lot of leverage in terms of what type of content is going to be produced. And how.”

These are interesting times for the adult industry. Technology is closing the technical gap between amateur and professional footage and performers have a host of platforms where they can innovate with the content they share. 

While weather premiums becoming a long-term, reliable source of income for performers remains to be seen, they are certainly showing users new ways to consume adult content. And with this shift in consumption so too are ideas evolving around sexuality, gender, and race.

Porn has always been a bellwether of our collective desires. Hopefully, the pandemic and a new year will see its continued advancement, and it will serve as the embodied echo of our social transformations.