#Avn stars 2018 professional#

Their brand expanded to offer a store for consumers to order custom clips, and a fan club where artists can monetize social media-like “lifestyle” content. Like other platforms, they take a cut of the profits, but the artist sets their own price and decides what and how much they want to upload. She started IWantEmpire with her husband, entrepreneur Jay Phillips, because she felt other host sites were underestimating her as an artist. My fans love that I’m confident enough to say, ‘This is what I want and you’re gonna give it to me.'” “I believe that I deserve the best out of life. Nikki got her start seven years ago working as an online financial dominatrix, offering phone and cam sessions to clients in which she expressed a personality she tells me isn’t really a character.

Hers is one of many companies vying for dominance in a sort of clips market arms race. Nikki is the executive vice president of, an umbrella company that includes IWantClips, IWantPhone, IWantFanClub and IWantCustomClips, with more in the works. Here we were, indie smut with a vision, and we lost to a tech host?

#Avn stars 2018 professional#

We were nominated in the somewhat self-contradicting category Best Professional Amateur Site, and were miffed when we lost to Clips4Sale, a platform which had been around since 2003 for creators to upload and sell short original videos. My Bay-Area scene was proud to think of ourselves as the forward-thinking weirdos, exemplifying the characteristics of the queer porn genre: body-positive and diverse, with a riot-grrrl aesthetic. The last time I was at the AVNs was in 2012, when I was nominated for producing and directing a niche site called QueerPorn.TV. As these models gain more economic influence, they are also raising the bar for consent conversations throughout the industry. The mass availability of easily pirated streaming video may have decimated the porn economy, but it seems that women are the ones adapting, finding fresh ways to connect directly with consumers.

Plenty of big names were in attendance – stars who had led more traditional adult-film careers – but they were outnumbered by scores of up-and-coming models who primarily built their own businesses using cam shows, original clip stores and monetized social-media platforms. Attendees of the 35th Annual Adult Entertainment Expo and Adult Video News Awards were treated to precisely this display of tech-mediated intimacy. Here’s the twist: This ain’t no dystopian nightmare. You try to talk to a young woman in heart-shaped pasties and booty shorts, but she’ll only give you a few seconds of attention before she’s back to clicking her shiny gold nails across her keyboard. You do this in order to meet porn stars in the flesh, to see them onstage celebrating the Oscars of the obscene, because – even though, according to Scientific American, half of us are now creating our own sexual content on our personal devices – there’s something superhuman about sexual celebrities.īut when you arrive at the convention, in place of your 1990s dream of impossibly proportioned stars in bedazzled Lycra posing for Polaroids, what you see is a 15,000-square-foot hall teeming with hundreds of beautiful, semi-clothed models of all shapes and styles, grinning into their laptops. You travel to Las Vegas, where the air has transformed into mentholated nicotine vapor and no one will validate your parking. Here’s a Black Mirror pitch: You pay several hundred dollars to attend the world’s biggest porn convention and awards ceremony.