There is no Screen Actors Guild for porno, so you make money by getting in, doing your shoot, getting your cash, and getting out. No matter how well your content does or how many people look at it and buy it, you get your few hundred dollars on the day of the shoot, and that’s it. It’s a big pile of money for the number of hours worked, but compared to the way money works for SAG performers, porn money sucks. Contract girls get better deals with royalties and such, but they are the exception rather than the rule. I definitely think there is a better way for adult modeling to be profitable for people who do it – but I’m not so sure that profit sharing is it. I’ve seen this on several alt porn sites over recent years, and I’m sure other kinds of sites -especially brand new ones without a good chunk of change at startup- offer it as well.
So, let’s break it down, from a bulletin I got on Myspace this week:
SatansSecret.com is a profit sharing Adult orientated [sic] website with all its models.Were giving models a chance to create there own fan base and earn some extra cash for themselves.
Now, I know that alt porn modeling is, in many ways, not a “real” part of the adult entertainment market. Girls do it for fun, for a thrill, for their ego, for street cred, and a million other reasons, but only a teeny tiny handful do it as their career, and many don’t consider it sex work. I’m guilty of that last one – most of the time, when I talk about having been a sex worker, I forget about the alt porn modeling stuff because it usually didn’t feel like work and because I didn’t make very much money at it. But using the idea of an internet fan base and extra pocket money to get girls naked on the internet? I dunno guys. That might be taking things a little lightly.
Basics of model payments:
You own your copyrighted work, SatansSecret.com is only Licensing them from you.
This is good, gotta give that to them. Most releases for both photographers and websites say that you don’t own copyright, it’s work-for-hire. But if there’s no hire, they gotta give you a little something.
Licensor shall receive 50% of revenue generated from personall website sales.
This is kind of funny because most real and professional porn sites have these things called affiliate programs, and then people who sign up for the programs host selected content from the sites on their sites, and if a consumer clicks through from that site and buys a membership, the affiliate gets a percentage of that monthly membership for the life of the membership. That number is often 50%. Affiliates are definitely not getting naked on the internet to make this money – (totally stereotyping here) you wouldn’t want to see most affiliates naked.
Licensor shall receive 40% of revenue generated from photo cd/cdrom or videos
sold to private collectors.
Or, you could DIY, and sell photos and dvds through your own website or blog and keep all the money yourself. Especially since this site wants you to arrange for a photo shoot and then send them the photos. If you’re already doing all the work of finding a photographer and setting up shoots, you should be earning that money. See Alix Lakehurst’s free site and blog We Could Be Naked if you can’t visualize how selling content yourself without a paysite (and merchant account).
There’s more, but that’s the stuff that really bugged me. Moral of the story is: girls (and boys), get greedy and keep that money for yourself to the greatest extent possible. And read that goddamn release!
5:57 am
“compared to the way money works for SAG performers, porn money sucks”
Wrong.
Take some time and read the SAG Ultra Low Budget Agreement, which covers films with budget of under (IIRC $200,000.) This is the SAG contract that would cover 99.99 percent of all porn productions.
Actors working under the SAG UBA make about $100/day (and that’s a 10 hour day,) with no residuals on the first 100,000 DVDs. Porn DVDs sales are measured in hundreds or thousands, not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands.
Broadcast residuals are calculated on a small percentage (less than 5%, paid to SAG, and then split among the performers by their formula) of the gross revenues from broadcast sales. Nevermindsing that most porn never sees any broadcast revenue, cable and on-demand lisensing fees for adult are laughably small, which would make the actors’ cut even smaller.
Even the few SAG actors who work under the standard SAG agreement rarely make much more than their dayrate, which right now stands at about $750/day. The number of SAG members who ever see meaningful residuals from broadcast or DVD sales is a fraction of the union membership.
Yes, I know, everybody’s got a friend or a cousin who was in a popular commercial or a TV show, and she’s still cashing checks 20 years later. But like the porn perform who gets into the business, keeps her head on straight, and gets out with a five-figure nest egg, the SAG actor who ever makes any real money from acting is the rare exception.
I’m sorry to come down like a ton of bricks, but your average SAG actor would be delighted if they could keep their clothes on and still get porn-scale.
SAG ULBA
http://www.sagindie.org/docs/sag-ultralowbudget-2005wm.pdf
SAG Rates:
http://www.sag.org/Content/Public/2005-08TVTheatrRates.pdf
1:12 pm
Thanks for the shout out!
I agree with you that porn money sucks but I don’t know enough about SAG to argue with Tony. Personally, I tend to work in porn very lightly. I choose not to go with an agent because I know my career will be over more quickly that way. I also want to make sure I make all the decisions about who I work for and what I do on screen.
It’s very hard to make money but it is possible. I spend most of my time researching possible jobs and doing background checks most of which don’t pan out. I turn a large amount of work down.
Comparing overall sales to my original paycheck is very disturbing. If I was under contract my life would be much easier and I would be making more money. But I’m not a contract girl and, I prefer to do it all on my own. That’s not to say I would turn down an invitation. Being under contract would free up much of my time to concentrate on other projects.
Either way I really enjoy what I do and work around 16 to 20 hours a day 7 days a week on it. I am happy and would rather do this and not make a great deal of money then go to a boring office every day and gossip with the IT guys.
I think Tony’s comment is helpful though. It does talk about what SAG is and that the glamorous life of an actor is all fiction.
The subject of your post however was not about SAG and more about profit sharing. No matter what, taking jobs like these makes very little cash for the models. If there is a company behind it you are working for someone else and you can bet they are taking a lot more than they should. As much as they say it’s better for you, it really isn’t. You lose ownership of your pictures and videos and your name is secondary to theirs. It isn’t as dandy as they say-no not at all.
7:14 am
The figures on what sort of work averages what sort of payment would be a pretty interesting thing to look at, even if it were just averages.
If all of these sites are taking a lot more than they should, someone setting up a site that takes less should attract a lot of models, right? So showing the numbers on how much a good site costs to run, how much it would take in, and how much it might pay out should be fairly easy. Same goes for films.
Is there such a resource? Because if not, there should be.
10:47 pm
I hear what you’re saying, Dacia, but the service that a site like SatansSecret provides in exchange for the cut they get is not nothing. First, they aggregate a lot of content in one place — a supermarket model rather than a boutique model — and second, they (theoretically, anyway) provide publicity and exposure for the model. Obviously you don’t have any problem marketing yourself, but that’s a talent that not everybody has, and even if they do, it’s a lot of time and effort they might not be willing to spend. What Alix spends (16-20 hours a day, 7 days a week) ain’t nothing, especially compared to a few hours of work on a weekend with a friendly photog.
Now, if that’s worth a 50% share of all membership purchases and 40% of all hardcopy sales, well, that’s a question that each model is going to have to evaluate for themself. That being said, what SatansSecret is offering isn’t nearly as bad as many, many contract terms I’ve seen out there for models. I’m not saying that the site is going to make a model rich, but making beer money from a photoshoot or two is a lot more than many people will ever make.
10:12 pm
The way I see it (and what my nearly 9 years in the online porn business has shown me) is the more you do your for yourself the bigger a piece of the pie you are going to get. Of course how big that pie actually is will vary based on your business model, your market and a bunch of other factors.
In the example you gave is that 50% after the admin fees and the affiliate cut? In most contracts I have seen the model cut comes last.
6:34 pm
[...] Waking Vixen » How not to make money: profit-sharing porn modeling “Moral of the story is: girls (and boys), get greedy and keep that money for yourself to the greatest extent possible. And read that goddamn release!” (tags: money work sexwork porn altporn web business interesting) [...]
7:10 pm
Maybe models don’t want to spend a lot of time marketing themselves, and posing nude is just something to do on the weekend. But the pictures are going to be around forever and if you spend even a little time on it you are committing to a lifetime of nudity.
Sites like Southern Charms offer the same type of deal of 50% subscriptions and 100% of hard goods. They boast that all you need to do is answer a few emails and you can make up to $1500 a month. The downside is you give up ownership of your pictures and they can post them long after you have quit. And the claim that answering a few emails is all you have to do is bogus.
If you want to become a nude model or a porn actress these sites aren’t a bad start but they are only a temporary stop to help teach girls how to market themselves. But nobody should get into this business if they can’t market themselves at least a little. Its common sense, if you like yourself and believe in yourself you can market yourself. If you don’t then you have no business taking off your clothes in the first place.
It may be a little harder at first to make the right decisions and take the right jobs but as with everything it can be learned through experience. But if you are getting into this business to make money you should have some idea of what direction you want to take. People think getting naked for the internet is an easy thing that should be treated with a light hearted laugh and its not. Everybody can see you!
Unfortunately, girls get into this business for the wrong reasons I understand. These companies benefit from them by giving them hopes of being able to make money without having to do anything but take a picture.
9:30 pm
Ah, Alix beat me to pointing out amateur network sites like Southern Charms.
My point in was going to be that many of these new-fangled revolutionary things being tried by some (wannabe) alt porn companies are things that the self-made amateur porn market has has in effect for 5-10 years. (Interaction with models, journals/blogs, models making a larger cut of the overall pie, more control over one’s image, etc.)