LAS VEGAS, Nevada––On a recent Friday, a crowd of three dozen or so filed into a conference room at the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada, for a panel on “industry disruption.” As Vegas goes, the audience was unusually corporate—an exceptional feat given that, just outside the conference room, several thousand tourists were stocking up on buttplug keychains and cam-girl calendars at the 36th annual AVN Adult Entertainment Expo, a five-day conference which draws professionals and fans from across the porn industry and culminates in the notoriously raunchy awards ceremony, known as the “Oscars of Porn.” But the conference room crowd was on a different wavelength, listening as a panel of three “enterprising industry executives” in business casual spoke about new technology in adult entertainment.
“Disruption” is a tedious term—a neologism once intended to celebrate radical, rule-breaking ideas, which has long been absorbed into the business lexicon it was meant to subvert—and for the most part, the AVN seminar did not dismiss the cliché. For the better part of an hour, panelists swapped Silicon Valley-style jargon about business models, e-commerce delivery schedules, and “progressive content strategies.”
But one speaker stood out. On the left side of the stage sat 37-year-old Bree Mills, a porn director, an actual outsider in the adult world, and the lone panelist to refrain from corporate-porn Newspeak. She is, in her words, a “shit disturber.”
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Mills, a compact blonde with Clark Kent glasses and boy-band bangs, had come to talk about her latest polarizing project: Adult Time, a subscription service for high-budget, well-produced adult videos, series, and movies, and an archive of some 50,000 high-quality scenes. She’s calling it the “Netflix of Porn.”
At first blush, Mills’ pitch might not seem all that outlandish. In an entertainment ecosystem where new streaming services seem to pop up everyday, it should follow that there could be one for porn, an industry whose lowest revenue estimates fall somewhere around $6 billion a year, and whose highest land closer to $97 billion. Among adult-world professionals, however, streaming services are a hard sell. “Does it sound feasible?” one performer, who did not want to be named, asked The Daily Beast. “No.”
Mills’ platform might not have sounded like such a gamble 20 years ago, when the pay model for pornography was pretty straightforward. In the 1990s, alongside most of mainstream media, smutty print mags like Playboy and Hustler were thick with glossy ads. Adult film studios produced movies and fans bought them on VHS, DVD, and pay-per-view channels. During the dotcom boom, the pay-per-view model translated easily online, and the porn economy was sustained by subscription sites. But in 2007, after the birth of YouTube, the entire business was upset by the proliferation of “tube” sites like Pornhub, YouPorn, and Redtube, which aggregated (and often pirated) porn videos, offering everything from BDSM to Hentai for the cost of a few clicks, a crowded screen of ads, and some sponsored content.
By the financial collapse of 2008, the adult world was embroiled in its own crisis. From its ashes emerged an industry monopoly comparable in scale to Facebook, Amazon or Google: a single web-hosting service called MindGeek, which owns at least four of the top 10 porn aggregator websites—such as Pornhub, RedTube, and YouPorn—as well as several major studios. In the past decade, MindGeek has fostered what writer David Auerbach dubbed a “vampire ecosystem”: a financially-precarious climate keeping porn directors and their production budgets, more or less, in a stranglehold.
But infeasibility is familiar territory for Mills. She first appeared on the porn radar in October of 2014, with the launch of an all-girl network called Girlsway, which produced several series with recurring characters and interwoven plotlines—an adult-content extended universe that fans quickly dubbed the “Marvel Comics of Lesbian Porn.” In September 2017, she followed up with a similar service called Pure Taboo, specializing in the now-ubiquitous genre “fauxcest,” which is, pretty much, what it sounds like. Neither project was expected to succeed—lesbian movies were long considered a money-loser in the adult world, and Pure Taboo was pretty out there (“It was so fucked up I thought it wasn’t legal,” one actor said). But both were huge hits—Girlsway consistently cleans house at the AVN Awards, and, just months after it launched, Pure Taboo took home five trophies, including Movie of the Year for a feature called Half His Age: A Teenage Tragedy.
“When she first showed up, there were people in the business that didn’t take her seriously, and said, Who the hell is this person? Don’t be stupid. Don’t listen to her,” said Derrick Pierce, an AVN-nominated adult performer who has worked with Mills. “The second phase was, This is so dumb, we’re laughing at her. Then, the third phase was, We need to start copying what she’s doing, because she’s killing it.”
At the AVN panel, Mills made an idealistic-but-confident case for high-budget porn, an argument journalists dream of hearing—namely, that there are still people who will pay for the good stuff. And she has good reasons to trust her gut. Unlike most adult execs, Mills didn’t “grow up in porn,” but got her start in marketing, where she worked for over a decade, first at Tower Records, and then at Adult Time’s parent company Gamma Entertainment, studying what brought people back to XXX sites. “Most of the time, what seemed to keep people as loyal subscribers was much more than the top-level porn categories,” she told the Daily Beast.
In other words, mainstream genres, what Mills called the “big tits stuff,” weren’t what people paid for. They could find those anywhere. “It was really the nuances and underground loyalty that made people true fans,” Mills said. That was the logic which led her, not long later, to make Girlsway and Pure Taboo. It’s also the reason that now, under the Adult Time umbrella, Mills is launching other specialized series—like Shape of Beauty, featuring a range of body types, Transfixed, starring trans performers, and Age and Beauty, for older women.
Mills is also right that people pay for porn. Subscription sites are less popular these days, but the adult industry has been taken over by direct-to-consumer services like premium Snapchats and camming. On sites like MyFreeCams and LiveJasmin, millions of viewers pay for programming every month, not by way of subscriptions or sales, but through “tips,” a credit system built into the webpages that allow viewers to compensate performers for carrying out certain tasks. The data on annual earnings is hard to calculate, but The New York Times estimated in 2013 that camming netted $1 billion annually, and the business has only grown since. (At the AVN Expo this year, the sheer economic force of MyFreeCams, who sponsored the whole ceremony, was on full display—their booths took up nearly half the floor space).
For all the industry’s doubts about streaming, Mills has her supporters. “I can watch all the things on Netflix on YouTube or somewhere else, but why do I pay for my Netflix subscription?,” Pierce asked. “Because it’s segmented, it’s allocated, it’s confined, it’s condensed, it’s put into categories I can easily follow, and access.” Dr. Shira Tarrant, a Women, Gender and Sexuality professor at California State University Long Beach, and the author of The Pornography Industry: What Everyone Needs To Know, agreed. “[Mills] is onto something....People are familiar with Netflix. It could be a model that would make people more comfortable, less secretive, prurient, furtive, than what’s typically associated with porn. It could take it out of Pervyville.”
Mills doesn’t see herself going up against MindGeek. If the megacorp thrives on quantity, she’s trying to hold down the fort for quality. “I just want to make movies,” she said. “And provide a platform for our actors to be actors.”
Between all her different series, which have merged on Adult Time, Mills has about 100,000 paid subscribers. They pay for plans ranging from $2.95 for a three-day trial to $9.95 a month for a year-long plan including streaming and downloads. She’s shooting for 1 million subscribers, but says anything that sustains the projects “would be great.” In an economy obsessed with constant growth, unicorn ventures, and “progressive content strategies,” valuing production over profits is pretty much the most disruptive thing possible.
