By popular demand I have started this thread. We produce solo girl, and girl-girl stuff, so please don’t ask me why hetro porn is so lame.
Hit me.
-
Are you a lesbian, and if not, how do you fake it?
-
Does your family know?
-
Do you go by your real name, or do you have a stage name?
-
How open about your work are you with your friends?
-
Why only solo and girl-girl?
-
Are you proud/ashamed/indifferent/something else about your career?
-
How’s the money?
Do you perform, or just direct/produce?
I believe abby is the businesswoman behind a successful porn site, but I’m happy to be corrected.
My question: where do you find willing actresses? Seems to me you have a pretty small catchment area (Melbourne?), and the social implications of someone appearing on a porn site are huge even in a national context. How do you recruit?
Goodness, that was fast.
I am, but I am not a model - I am a producer.
Do my parents know? Yes. Understand… not really. They are not so down with the whole internet thing.
No comment on that one.
[quote]
4) How open about your work are you with your friends?[\quote]
Very. They are cool about it. Some of them don’t like our genre much, but they respect it.
It’s a niche I like personally, so I can produce it with passion and devotion to the genre.
I am proud of the business I have built (as time progresses it becomes more about running a successful, fast paced, company, than about porn production). By that I mean, porn production is the “easy” part. The hard part is keeping the ship on course, forward planning, research and development, etc (we employ 35 full time staff).
I sometimes have paranoid moments that we’re destroying models lives and stuff, but then I get an email from a model saying what fun she has had over the past few months, and how she’s looking forward to doing more shoots.
Good, for us. Turnover is around $10m per annum.
For others in the industry it sucks. Industry wide, I’d say it’s average. Growth is not up or down, profits are not up or down. There are more and more people on the internet, but the legislative sitch in the US is more restrictive, and there’s issues with Hi Def production and distro.
It’s not a guarenteed success by any means - there are a lot of excellent producers out there (producing stuff that alot of people whant to pay money to see, as opposed to producing stuff that no one wants to see, but they still produce it anyway).
You make it sound like their problem is not so much with porn as with the Internet as such. Are they some kinda Luddites?
Correct.
We don’t have a problem finding models. Melbourne has a population of 3.7million people.
We’re lucky in that Aussie men generally do not like our stuff, which means the chance of being busted is lower. For these reasons, we do not advertise in Australian media.
Some models, I guess around a third, are quite happy to be busted, and in fact will go around telling people proudly (inclding their parents and employer). Sometimes, that does not work out so well - we always advise models to keep it on the lamb.
A few of our models have been busted in a bad way, but we go to significant lengths in the audition to tell them about the risks, so we tend to loose models at that stage, rather than after the fact. For example, we ask them how they’d feel if their boss found out - would they loose their job? What if their parents found out - would the be dis-owned? If the answer is yes, we recommend they do not do modelling.
haha. Yes. They don’t have a problem with porn, they have a big problem with “those computer things”.
That’s interesting. Do you know why?
I know your site; it’s very well respected and reviewed. Must also say, it’s nice to see some girls with pubic hair!
Not definitively, tho we’re about to do some market research into this very area. Anecdotally, they prefer more classically beautiful models, shot in a more traditional way. Very 90’s stylings (of course, I am generalising here).
Thanky!
I’m curious about this too. Have you seen any interesting patterns in the way that your work is accepted in different countries/cultures? Also, do you primarily market to women, or to heterosexual men who like to see girl-on-girl stuff?
Not really. The bulk of our customers are Americans. Again anecdotally, this is based on a general culture fight back against the fake boobs, shaved, “trad porn” (as we call it here). In this way, I feel Australian culture is a little behind the curve.
Continental Europeans have always been bang up for everything, and we have a sizeable British subscriber base. Americans demand a differnt style of customer service to subscribers from other countries, but that’s about it.
We market agnostically, but a huge majority of our customers are men. We have a small but passionate female following.
Well, one would hope. drum riff
How did you get into the business?
As a consumer, I was pissy about the choices in 1999. Porn sites got amateur models (cos they were cheap) and dressed them up to look like porn stars (cos they were popular), missing the very things that make amateur models attractive in the first place: they are not slutty porn stars!
So I shot some stuff with the intention to sell it to existing sites. They were agressively dismissive of the stuff I shot, said I needed to get the models shaved, pro makeup, heels, etc *then *we could talk. After a few similar responses (satisfyingly, from sites that are no longer in existance), I decided to go ahead and make my own site. How hard could it be?
It was very hard, and I had not one clue on what I was doing (apart from, I liked the idea of amateur models). Originally started a a hobby that I expected would be expensive, but satisfying. No idea it’d turn into a successful business.
Pardon the naive question, but is that $10,000,000 USD or some other currency?
Follow-up: why the hell not!? 
Sorry, shoulda clarified. USD.
Wow, congrats. That’s a lot of money! 
I like your site abby partly because it’s really hot, and partly because the women involved seem to be enjoying themselves. I know that that is all part of the pornographers art, but you lot are really good at it.
Anyhow, besides that, what do you think about the somewhat less salubrious side of the industry? There are certainly people being exploited out there (I’m thinking of a certain film financed to the tune of 350 dollars, made in Brazil, and paid for by some members of a popular website). How do you ensure that your models are doing their thing through their own free will? What is the legislative environment in Australia wrt porn? Do you find that you as a responsible company have to defend an entire industry?
First of all, abby, I was a member of your site for a while, under the same username I have here. I’d say that AbbyWinters is the best site I’ve seen. The women on your site actually look like real women - attractive women, but still real. I like the fact that they all look extremely healthy and generally in good shape, even with the wide variety of body types. They seem like rugged, outdoors-type women, which is something that I like and that no other site I’ve seen appears to offer. My favorite model on your site is Susie (I gathered that she is also involved with the production of the site in some way.)
I liked the extremely high quality of all the pictures, and the very large size. I also like the fact that the settings of the shots do not seem contrived or overdone at all. They just look like real places.
However, you claim that there is no heterosexual sex on your site, but I do remember a small section of it. There were only like 6 different sets of it, but it was there.