Sean from www.pornlegends.com posts: Ah, 1978. Disco was dying and the minimum wage was $2.65 per hour. During this time, the more popular female adult film stars would make about $1000.00 per day during the production of a movie that could last several days. This is when porn movies were shot like "real" Hollywood films.
Adult industry revenue projections were hard to come by back then, since mostly men wearing fancy suits and pinky rings all but controlled the industry. A safe guess would be revenue would have been in the multi-million dollar range.
Porn in the 1980s and early 1990s brought the world Ginger and Amber Lynn, Christy Canyon, and the VHS machine. Adult videos were introduced into homes of millions as video sales and rentals skyrocketed. Can you remember when VHS titles sold for $59.95 to $99.95 EACH! For the first time, "billions" began to enter into the adult industry vocabulary. During this time, the average porn starlet would earn about $500 a day on a production. The better known stars would make about $1000 a day, and the likes of Traci Lords would make somewhat more. Because of the introduction of video tape, most productions lasted about 2 days.
The new millenium brings the industry estimated (and it is just an estimate) annual sales of anywhere between 4 billion and 12 billion. Instead of a day rate that many worked for "back in the day," most starlets are now paid on a per scene basis.
Starlets (and these figures are an average) get paid $200 for a solo scene, $300 - $400 for a BJ scene, $800 for boy/girl, $1000 for anal, and $1200 for a DP scene.
That damn inflation...As the industry counts revenue in the billions today, lets see how the per scene rates figure into 1985 dollars. We consider that year the top end of the "golden age" of porn. The $200 solo today would have been $120.30 back then, the BJ scene would have been $240.59 (we can see a producer counting out the pennies), the boy/girl scene would have been $481.19, etc.
At this very moment we suspect producers and production companies sure wish they had that 1985 scale to work with in today's dollars.
Not so fast, lets do a little reverse action here. If today's scale was used back in 1985 and compared it to today's dollars, that solo scene would jump from $200 to $332.51. That $400 BJ would today cost $665.02, and the boy/girl scene would now be $1330.04.
Thank God the adult industry isn't run like Major League Baseball, although the industry boasts more revenue than the three major professional sports leagues combined.
Comparing the increase in baseball salaries over the last 16 years to today's porn scale (this is fun), the current $200 solo would be $1240. That $400 BJ would run about $2480. The $800 boy/girl scene would be $4960. The $1000 anal...$6200. Look out, that $1200 DP would be $7440.
Have you figured out the lesson for today? For those who can't decipher it, we'll tell you. With an industry that boasts revenue in the billions of dollars, the talent is making just about the same amount of money today as they did 20 year years ago. This is not what the late President Reagan would call a good example of trickle down economics.
