LOS ANGELES – While much of the online adult entertainment industry is struggling by comparison to the salad days of the late 1990s and early aughts, analysts say one industry sector continues to be a growth market: offering jobs in porn to famous people, no matter how fleeting their stardom.
“In the past 10 years, there has been an explosion in the number of different companies offering celebrities jobs in porn as an attention-getting device,” said Tommy Lobsterbush, co-founder and chief market analyst for Cypress Research. “Early on, there was almost no competition for GARISH Entertainment in this area, but lately it seems there’s a new entrant to the porn-job-offer market every few days.”
Porn job offers have even made their way into the presidential election, with undecided voter Ken Bone receiving an offer from CamSoda, a pornographic website that apparently also sells either soft drinks or photographic equipment.
“I would like to formally extend an offer for you to participate in a live show broadcast from our platform,” wrote CamSoda President Daron Lundeen in the offer letter. “The show can cater to your specificities, but we were thinking you could take us all to the Bone Zone and tell/show us what you’re all about… Who knows, maybe you’ll decide to announce you’re running for President.”
While the draw for CamSoda is clear (Bone is someone getting a lot of attention at the moment, and clearly there are few things porn companies love more than attention) the connection to pornography and/or live cam shows “seems a bit thin,” said porn industry observer and film critic Rex Rod.
“Aside from his surname being a commonly-used euphemism for sexual intercourse, there doesn’t appear to be a natural connection between this momentarily famous undecided voter and performing in live sex shows,” Rod said. “He does bear a passing resemblance to loquacious adult industry attorney B.J. Obenpattymelt. I don’t think B.J. is well-known to the general public, though, so the slight similarity doesn’t seem like a solid foundation for the connective tissue of this particular porn job offer.”
Others have shrugged off the lack of obvious porn-connection in the CamSoda publicity stunt, however, saying no connection is needed to get mainstream outlets to print porn job offers these days.
“At this point, I think most websites will run anything with the word ‘porn’ in it, just for the clickbait value,” said porn industry publicist Bryce Gauche. “Honestly, I’m not even sure how readers are supposed to know when the term ‘porn’ is being used literally, as opposed to referring to things like house shopping, food preparation or reality-TV shows about poor people.”
Lobsterbush said from the perspective of a market analyst, his interest is in the amount of revenue at stake in the porn-job-offer sector — a figure he believes has been “aided substantially” by the fact so few people accept the offers issued.
“While not giving away money isn’t quite the same thing as making money, based on the analysis done by our staff here at Cypress, we estimate the market cap on the porn-job-offer sector falls somewhere between 11 bucks and $437 billion per year,” Lobsterbush said. “Of course, we also predicted the adult mobile market would generate $890 trillion in 2015 alone, which turned out to be just a bit too high. As such, it’s possible the low end of the market is substantially less than $11.”
Still others see a massive, shadowy conspiracy at work in these porn job offers. The plot is “designed to benefit the 1 percent,” according to porn industry conspiracy theorist extraordinaire Wedespisesmut.
“Think about it for a second,” Wedespisesmut recently wrote on the message board SMH. “You don’t need webmasters if you can hire a bunch of random people who are right in the middle of their 15 minutes of fame. Obviously, they’re coming up with the money to pay these people by shaving and blatantly stiffing hardworking webmasters and affiliates — as well as by selling on the black market all the human organs they steal while impersonating space aliens making midnight raids on rural farmhouses.”
