Live Inter-Active Cam shows The New Frontier of Porn….Again!
Op/Ed by Mariah Milano
Back when I was getting started in this business in 1998 the internet was considered taboo and girls were discouraged from shooting for anything internet related. It was seen as a passing thing and DVD was king and the porn industry machine kept rolling. Well as we all know now it has pretty much rolled itself right into the ground. The big production houses didn’t get online with any presence for years and very few have a real presence now. People were making money hand over fist and didn’t even really have to work or learn the business to become extremely successful, myself included. But some of us actually kept ahead of the trends and didn’t sit back and count our money but instead we branched out into other avenues of the industry and when times changed we were already there while those who rode the wave were totally lost and when it was time to work the business and adjust on the fly to the new trends they failed and they took others down with them. This seemed to have been a common problem and if you look at the amount of companies who aren’t here anymore I think you will agree.
My first experience with online porn was when I was on set and some people were pulling up amateur websites where the photos loaded in segments which took forever. There were no videos and most of the girls with content online were swingers and amateur models. There were no porn stars at all and the new thing was live webcams where guys paid by the minute to chat with a girl broadcasting from her own house. It was fantastic in theory but considering everyone was paying by the minute to be online through dial up and then paying the girls online by the minute it got costly very quickly, but no one cared. Suddenly there was a brand new industry where girls in any town in the world simply needed a computer a phone line and a webcam to make a very decent living and it was legal and private and anonymous. You could be pretend to be anyone you wanted to be and charge $3 per minute role playing and flirting with the safety of anonymous inter-action. My first live cam account was with ifriends back in 2000 and at the time when I logged in there would be 40 other girls online. Now there are more than 2500 girls online at all times! ifriends was about the only company back then and now there are literally hundreds of live cam sites.
As DSL and High-speed internet became a household thing online porn exploded. Videos became king and photos downloaded in an instant and those live girls who used to move in stuttered motion at 2 frame per second were now in full motion video with audio!
Now here we are all these years later and live webcam is the most stable and the top money making venue in online porn. You can download every major video release as well as all the amateur videos for free on thousands of sites and the future of video production doesn’t look so good anymore. In a business that in 2001 Larry Flynt boldly stated "never lost demand even when the cost went up" we are looking at a complete collapse in the coming years if piracy isn’t defeated.
The one thing that you cannot pass around on the tube sites and torrents is a girl live at that very moment inter-acting with the viewers in real time. Even the major porn stars are logging in to make the money they aren’t making anymore shooting movies.
The production companies are even streaming their shoots online for pay per minute viewers to cover some of their expenses like location rentals and talent fees. It’s the only aspect of our industry that has a future considering that televisions are being built with standard web-ready interfaces and can you imagine the revenue that having a live girl of your choice in full screen HD on your 60 inch flat screen will bring?
The new frontier is once again live inter-active video feeds whether they be on television as a pay per view channel or pay-per-minute viewing through a girl broadcasting from her bedroom for $4.99 per minute. There is still plenty of money to made in online porn these days and even more in the days to come, it just isn’t in video production anymore.
Mariah Milano