I don’t think it’s porn if it’s private.
Just like the pre-internet joke has it:
Q: What two groups of people never have sex?
A: Your parents and your children.
Yeah, riiiiight. Suuure they don’t.
Possible? Already here.
I’d WAG more 0.69% …
I think definitions will vary among people, hence my clarification. Unless I’m misunderstanding you, I personally don’t see a public vs private distinction. Homemade porn made for one’s own consumption is still porn. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it is what it is.
Fair enough.
- Mail Order and book stores didn’t have the reach of the internet, but they certainly distributed porn tapes - often in the tens of thousands or more per title. This includes amateur and home made. While much of what’s considered amateur isn’t exactly home made, you had people like Mike South (who has answered porn questions here) making movies in the early 90s and others long before him. Homegrown Video was established in 1982. They certainly released and distributed legit home made porn on a fairly large scale way back then. There were other amateurs and home made companies and individuals selling in stores and catalogs.
Even for the internet… I remember back around 1994 or so there was a big controversy where I lived because a husband and wife made an “amateur wives” subscription website and they used the police car of a guy who was also a mayor in another town in one of their shoots. They got national publicity, had an online webring of sites along with other “wives,” a thriving membership site, forums, and advertised in the local paper for models. There weren’t tube sites yet, but there were amateurs naked online… everywhere.
- Then these home made tape from the 1980s and before end up… on the internet. Just like music released before 2005 ended up on Youtube (or Napster, etc). You see home made videos from a long time ago online, including not only commercially released amateur home made porn but personal home movies. I have seen many an online porn video with the camcorder date stamped on it.
As far as the OP, I believe the actual % is very small and I remember reading and replying to this exact question here before. The number of pro porn performers is very low, the number of home made tapes that were distributed online is a little bit higher, and the number of people who have made some sort of sex tape that is locked up in a safe or on a digital device but never distributed is fairly significant.
Back in even the 1990s, those video cameras were expensive. Not everyone had them. My folks didn’t own a camcorder, and lots of other folks didn’t. Plus the tapes were expensive. So filming a porno - which would require you to set up a tripod and plan it in advance and everything - I don’t think is something most couples would do.
Now, well, I had a girl on top of me a few years ago. She just casually picked up her phone and pressed the record button while we were doing it. I felt uncomfortable - I wasn’t feeling camera ready - but I didn’t ask her to stop, so I’m sure there’s a shitty amateur video out there somewhere now. There’s so many that the odds of anyone recognizing me are zilch, especially since the video wasn’t exactly hot.
And before cameras one had to hire a little man on a stepladder doing rapid sketches.
Now that’s a Fermi problem I doubt you’ll get asked at a job interview.
But when it does, and if he’s an applicant, LSLGuy is hired.
Perhaps not.
The esteemed Chronos asserts I got the conclusion exactly backwards. Good math all the way to the goal line. My own goal line. Oops.
No glory (or jam) for me today.
You guys going math on that GQ? Really? 
We’ll I (or my friend, I do not remember) did once stumble on some local face. If it adds numbers. 
While we’re chasing definitions, I’ve also heard that a significant (maybe even a majority) of “amateur” porn was intended to be private, but then released either by “digital accident/crime” or by one of the parties without the consent of the others. Not sure if that should count or not.
Or at the very least there’s two questions: What percentage has been in sexually explicit publicly-available video material, and what percentage of those intended for it to be public at the time of shooting?
I’m not sure if I buy the argument that the second number is relatively low or not, but I’ve definitely heard it claimed.
IMHO, sex videos don’t become porn until available to the masses.
Or we’ll be the old fuddy-duddies with an outdated and distorted idea of what normal sex is like. Kind of like how our parents’ music sucks. 
I’m referring more to the dynamic between the man and the woman found in most hetero porn. In most porn (or at least the most popular stuff) women are depicted as existing solely to please men. I don’t think that normalizing such notions would be healthy or progressive in any way.
Porn yesterday and porn tomorrow.
I’ve heard stories from sources of assorted levels of reliability that there is some truth in this. For example, people who didn’t know that pubic hair is normal in adults, and people who are wondering why they aren’t able to have children, and it turns out that the sex acts they engage in aren’t conducive to the process. 
This includes young women being forcibly anally raped and not knowing that there was anything wrong with what had happened to them. They thought this was how it was SUPPOSED to be done, and men who also think this is normal.
Supposedly a few of the short-time places in Bangkok secretly filmed room occupants. If true, there are quite a few guys who never knew.
Or in my case, forty seconds, tops.
Regards,
Shodan