“It’s not like I’m out at a bar telling my friends about the porno I’ve just commissioned,” he says. Yet it’s one that he likes to keep to himself. (Though this endeavor had the blessing of his wife, he asked to have his name changed for privacy.) “Developing a custom is exhilarating – yeah it’s kind of smutty and odd but it’s also a rewarding creative process,” says Joel.
“Yes, there’s all this free content, but it’s like watching too much comedy – you become jaded or nothing feels new or different,” says a 36-year old man we’ll call Joel, who recently dropped $2,000 to bring a 20-page script about a crazy scientist and his sex-act-inducing potion to life. “Customs evolved because we had to start fulfilling a specific fantasy not available on those free tube sites.”ĭespite the massive free market, a small, cash-flush contingent of fans, fatigued by the watered-down or repetitive quality of mainstream porn, are choosing to throw their coin into the bespoke experience. “The Internet’s done nothing but shoot holes in mainstream porn, not unlike what happened back in the day with Napster and the music industry,” says Carter’s producer, Nick Sterling. As journalist Jon Ronson documented in his Audible podcast The Butterfly Effect, the custom adult film trend has emerged as a way to bring life back into a biz that nearly bled to death from rampant film pirating and the rise of free sites like Youporn, RedTube, and – the Mecca – Pornhub, which sees a staggering 75 million viewers a day.