The Wolf’s Den: The 3 Reasons People Still Buy Porn

As fans of MormonBoyz (RIP) probably know, I was raised Mormon. Which meant that I had a very scripted life: I was going to marry a woman and be a doctor. I was playing my part perfectly, too—went on a Mormon Mission, got into medical school… and promptly realized this wasn’t what I wanted to do.

When that happens, suddenly the entire world opens up. If I’m throwing out the script, then everything is on the table. I quickly realized I wanted to play in the coolest space at the time: Web 2.0.

A lot of things happened pretty quickly after that, starting with the economy tanking in 2008 and my husband Jay and I getting married. On our honeymoon we were discussing our future together and we thought, “If everything’s made up, and we can do anything in our lives, why don’t we do porn? Why not work in a field where you use your body and have an orgasm and make money?”

After we lost our original company, we never really gave trying a different field much thought. We’d just spent a decade building skills and a passion for an industry we knew nothing about a 10 years earlier. We believed in the idea, we believed in our product, and we believed that our skills and our ability to understand porn set us heads above the competition.

Because there is a lot of bad porn out there. People love to wax nostalgic about the “golden days” of gay porn in the ’70s, but that’s weird! And not true. So when we made the choice to reboot and try again, we never had any doubt that cream would rise a second time. Even in the days of fan platforms and tube sites and free porn everywhere, people still pay for enough porn to keep our business not just solvent but growing at a rapid clip. And I think the reasons people still pull out their wallets is threefold. 

Reason 1: This Is Not Saturday Night Live
You can’t diffuse your product by trying to please too many masters. (Unless that is your product!) Successful porn companies find a niche and serve it over and over and over. You don’t deviate from it. When someone goes to your site, they expect to see the same thing. If your formula is a bunch of tops lining up for a willing bottom ready to be a cum dumpster, you have to give them that exact same thing every time. If they clicked on your site and saw two beautiful uncut European guys having sex in a field of golden barley, they’d be like WTF? 

Reason No. 2: The Leakage Rule
Your porn has to turn someone on—ideally yourself. It should give you a fucking boner. So every time you’re filming it or viewing it, it should make you leak precum in your pants. You have to be a big enough pervert to know this is a turn on. If you think it will turn other people on, then you’ll miss the mark. It’s not enough to say, “I hear guys like dicks in buttholes, so let’s show that and someone will like it.” If you think, “I don’t get it but someone somewhere’s going to like this,” it’s not right. It needs to be specific to you, because then the specific becomes the universal. This is also one of the biggest flaws in the companies that are run by straight executives who think sex is sex. Which leads to Reason No. 3.

Reason No. 3: 
To make your porn sell right out the gate, you should be the only game in town to a degree. You won’t have the marketing or the history, so you want to be something that no one else is really doing. We created Boy for Sale because I didn’t see anything else that was a really nice late-teen-early-twenty-something “twink” slave boy site. I saw lots of generic bondage boys kidnapped and whipped and beaten and strung up and fucked, usually against their will on nearly all sites (fantasy of course), but nothing concretely showing the slave boy fantasy end to end as a story.

The irony is that the consensual fantasy we created with Boy for Sale is the most vanilla of the BDSM sites, and people had this huge negative reaction, calling it sex trafficking. But this is BDSM stuff that’s been around forever! I just focused on a particular aesthetic, and it resulted in people paying attention. 

Once you have a name and a brand out there, there’s inertia. So a brand that gets huge like, I dunno, Sean Cody, can actually start to suck a little bit and still succeed. Say you’re Sean Cody and you have a decade-plus history of giving subscribers hot jock guys, starting with a really fun interview and then having incredible sex on camera, sometimes for the first time, and always like it’s a celebration. After eight years the quality on Sean Cody was still strong; even if it had gone down, it would still be very profitable. But then it transferred hands to a giant straight company called MindGeek (owners of PornHub among other things) and started getting produced by said straight company, and the content was shit. But Sean Cody benefited from being under the same umbrella that encompasses PornHub, and because PornHub has billions of viewers, the site gets tons of advertising there. What happened? Sales went up even as the quality went down.

When the quality went down so far that people stopped buying in the same volume, the ads stopped running. But now there was a huge amount of momentum. So many thousands of subscribers will continue to let their credit card bill and rebill that the site will continue to make money even as the quality of the site is shit in comparison to what it was. From a business standpoint it might be bad porn, but it’s good money.

That’s why it really matters to talk about these things. At what point in the life cycle of a porn brand do you have such brand recognition that people go there as a default? Because you run the risk of prioritizing profit over product, and that exposes millions of people to mediocre content that gives the rest of the industry a bad name.

When that happens, it usually indicates something changed in the company, and in my opinion it’s consistently that it’s taken over by a straight company. Not always, but with most of the big brands of the last eight years that’s been one of the biggest issues. 

What’s funnier to Men.com than a clueless woman? Imagining an older woman as a sexual being, of course!

Look at Men.com. They initially had decent porn. But because they had such a tremendous platform, they didn’t really have to care about it. So they started recycling straight flicks with bad writing and idiotic meme-worthy images of guys making over-exaggerated faces. “Make a huge OMG face with your hands on either side of your head like the famous Home Alone image. That is what we want on banners. The video doesn’t matter,” directors will tell the talent on a Men.com shoot. But MEN had inertia from day one because MindGeek had money and a huge platform with the ability to advertise the site to millions of potential customers. That’s what happens when you own and operate one of the biggest piracy operations on the planet that has billions of viewers eager to view stolen content, and billions of dollars and tons of advertising. 

But the reason my husband Jay and I got into porn and eventually returned to it with Carnal Media and now our streaming platform, Carnal+, is that we’re passionate about it. Now, some people get involved in projects where they only have passion but they don’t think about profit. And in the case of gay porn, it very easily can be both. But the people most successful are the people who are aroused by the porn they are making. 

We know that for a fact from the explosive launch of Carnal+, which had an unheard of conversion rate. When people respond that way, it proves my point. We’re here to make money doing something we are passionate about, rather than flogging a product we don’t believe in because we want your money.

Carnal Media really is about affirming something that is frequently not affirmed, especially in the gay community: Your fantasies are fantastic and we want you to have those fantasies. We’re tired of the variety shows out there in terms of big (mostly straight) porn companies trying to serve gay audiences. Every week it’s some new meme: “Have you had your dicks with salad? Have you tried your sex stuck in an elevator? Try your gay sex this way, that way! Isn’t gay sex hilarious? Look at the outrageous facial expressions when someone takes a dick!”

Those companies have no clue what is erotic. They just think it’s funny, makes them money, and with hot guys there, someone somewhere will think it’s hot.

How about we make porn that we think is hot first, and that someone somewhere will like it second? That’s our mission at Carnal: to bring the pervs out in full force. 

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