Porn Valley- If one sentence of warning could have been issued to entertainment executives ten years ago, it would have been: “Make way, the amateurs are coming.”

Television networks have been taken over by reality Goliaths-especially in wake of the omnipresent writer’s strike-and DVD sales across the board seem to be in a perpetual state of free-fall.

Such cataclysmic Hollywood conditions have, not surprisingly, been mirrored by their pornographic counterparts. According to Adult Video News, total DVD sales in the industry fell 11 per cent in 2007, to an estimated $3.8-billion.

“While people disagree as to how much such sites have affected the market for online adult content, there is general agreement that free sites have made it harder for subscription websites and DVD companies to sell their products and have driven the price of adult product down, industry-wide,” says Quentin Boyer, managing editor at XBiz World Magazine, which discusses issues surrounding the adult entertainment business.

Do-it-yourself porn websites such as YouPorn and XTube (which mimic YouTube in setup and function) have mounted the adult entertainment industry, perhaps permanently. Nine months after going live in 2006, according to Portfolio magazine, YouPorn had 15 million users and was growing at a rate of 37.5 per cent per month. Online reality porn has become so prevalent that the annual pornography award show by Adult Video News recently added two new categories: Best Amateur Tape and Best Amateur Series.

While it seems that everyone is sweating to find a way to get audiences to pay for content on the Internet these days, web-based porn companies are leagues ahead.

XTube, for example, has developed a business model that utilizes innovations such as wikis and social networking. At XTube, the audience pays 50 cents to $2.50 to view homemade porn flicks. Those who post the videos receive 50 per cent of the revenue, while the remainder goes to the site to cover costs.

Among the multitude of amateur porn Web sites, a handful exist as an evolution within the industry. Beautifulagony.com was nominated at the Australian Adult Industry Awards as the Best Adult Website. This may be surprising considering that, by porn standards, it seems like pretty tame place to go for impromptu solo sessions. There is no nudity on Beautiful Agony. Most videos do not even offer skin below the neck. Instead, Beautiful Agony focuses on the erotic, rather than pornographic, nature of sex by featuring close-up videos of people’s facial expressions during orgasm.

“We were deconstructing porn and agreed that, against intuition, it was the face rather than flesh which was the essential core of erotic appeal,” says Richard Lawrence, one of the site’s creators. “So we tried it out by getting some… contributors, females and males, to submit videos of their face during orgasm and the results were undeniably sexy.”

In charging access fees, Beautiful Agony is able to pay the video posters a comparable rate to what they might earn in a small softcore porn role.

Boyer maintains that, despite popular perceptions, the rise of amateur porn produced on Web sites such as XTube and even Beautiful Agony that pay their performers (however minimally) “is largely illusory.”

In Boyer’s eyes, “many of the ‘amateur’ sites… online are not amateur endeavors at all; they are cleverly disguised commercial enterprises making use of lesser-known performers and/or performers making their first appearances in adult content.”

Undeniably, the rise of amateur adult entertainment Web sites such as XTube and Beautiful Agony are affecting content in the ‘established’ porn industry, leaving the previously major corporate giants scrambling to keep up.

“Predictably, the [established porn industry are] mak[ing] lame copies… [they are] trying to cling to an eroding market,” says Lawrence. “But it’s the same old stuff, with tatts and metalwork added. The mainstream porn industry is hopelessly out of touch with their audience.”

However, Boyer believes the market may eventually grow weary of “reality” porn.

“The top selling titles on the market include Digital Playground’s Pirates-a high budget (especially by adult industry standards) production replete with CGI special effects and a fully developed plot line,” he says.

Regardless, the rise of amateur porn sites has not come without its own legal problems, which, for example, include difficulties in verifying user ages.

“It’s impossible to regulate anything on the Internet,” says Lawrence. “When somebody sends us a folio of their naked images, they take it for granted that we won’t use them in some other context… personally, I would like to see an industry body with a code of practice that audits members, so consumers can be given reasonable assurance the porn is being ethically produced.”

According to Boyer, the lack of regulations in the industry can be linked to the American government’s hesitancy to take any action that might be seen as endorsing pornography.

“Within Congress and within various lower legislative bodies, I’d imagine that there are many who fear that if the government steps in to require that all adult performers wear condoms during intercourse, or to impose other similar restrictions… [might] further legitimiz[e] the adult industry,” he says. “Lawmakers like us to be a little unsure of our status, I think, and are loathe to adopt any form of trade or production regulation, as doing so would suggest the adult industry is like any other… regulated enterprise.”

“The real pull towards amateur isn’t even the fact that it’s real people in sometimes believable situations, it’s that movies put out by the larger studios just can’t possibly accommodate all the niche appeal that amateurs can. If you happen to really like brunettes with freckles and green eyes, you’re a lot more likely to get some kind of result on that when you’re on an amateur site than a professional studio,” says Ryan, a U3 arts student who has made multiple pornography videos posted on XTube.*

Another 21-year old McGill undergraduate student, Dinah, explains the draw to amateur Web sites in her regular pornographic ventures.*

“In Quebec you can get soft core porn very easily, however I prefer sex you can get on the Internet because it’s more raw,” she says. “Regular porn is too polished-hairless body parts for both the male and female roles… It’s nice to be able to see the guy, especially his face, as a woman. In traditional porn, it’s just a cock.”

Though Lawrence acknowledges that the movement towards amateur porn may not strengthen representations of female empowerment in the industry-especially considering that consumers remain overwhelmingly male-he suggests such Web sites can serve as more gender-positive vehicles.

“I think the historical treatment of women as being lowered in status by participating in flesh-oriented commerce is a problem and anything which helps them challenge that is worthwhile,” Lawrence says.

Dinah admits to having experimented in filming her own homemade porn with her long-term boyfriend.

“The appeal was both the aspect of being seen and identifying with the allure of the porn star,” says Dinah. “A lot of it is also about having someone watching you, even if it’s yourself.”

“Everyone I spoke to found [being naked] a very powerful experience,” says Lawrence of his decision to start his other amateur adult entertainment Web site ishotmyself.com, which features naked photos of its users. “On a Web site you can exercise your exhibitionism while maintaining a safe distance… For some it’s the experience of creating the shoot that counts and they may not even look at the site.”

Dinah insists the appeal of porn is similar to the appeal of Cosmopolitan magazine to women: It feeds off of insecurities, suggesting that the audience is not engaging in sex as well as they could be.

“We’ve gotten to a point where everyone is very uncomfortable with the idea of having a ‘vanilla’ sexual relationship. [Society] is telling us that we need to buy things-be it a cam corder, camera or dildo-and add things into our sex lives to make them better,” she asserts. “This is something they tell us cannot happen naturally, that we need some sort of outside influence, and that is patently untrue. Sex is best when it is unfettered and raw and draws only on the connection between two people, hence the appeal of amateur porn which helps bring light to the often-ignored simplicity of good sex that is, in and of itself, a turn on.”