Ethical Porn and the Dicey Future of Adult Content

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Step into the world of abbywinters.com, a resilient 23-year-old amateur adult paysite that has weathered the bumpy and ever-changing digital landscape for adult media companies.

Launched in 2000 by CEO and Creative Director Garion Hall, abbywinters.com provides a contrast to the often staged and airbrushed photos prevalent in the adult entertainment industry. Today it continues to attract a significant following as a female-friendly porn site and for its authentic portrayal of women’s sexuality and beauty.

Yet, it hasn’t been a smooth journey.

Prompted by legal difficulties, the company relocated its offices from Australia to Amsterdam in 2010. The previous year, abbywinters.com’s parent company, G Media, faced charges related to the production and sale of unrated DVDs in Victoria, Australia. Ultimately, the company pleaded guilty and was fined AU$ 6,000.

It also shut down its camming platform, Playdates in 2021 after it failed to earn revenue. And it looks like there’s more turbulence ahead for abbywinters.com.

In a recent interview with SexForEveryBody.com, Garion Hall discusses the future of online adult content and ethical practices within the pornography industry.

What has changed and what has stayed the same for abbywinters.com since its launch in 2000?

When we started, producing erotic content of so-called “amateur models” (as opposed to professional porn models) was unusual. Companies that worked with amateur models dressed them up, applied extensive makeup, and directed them to behave like porn stars.

We had a vision for a different approach, showing what’s appealing about “amateur” models themselves, just regular young women comfortable showing their sexuality online. You know, the person behind the counter at the bank or pharmacy, the road traffic controller, uni student, the nurse, the data analyst, the barista. And we show them how they look when they’re just hanging out at home, no makeup, on a Sunday afternoon. It was pretty revolutionary at the time, but there’s been a lot of copycats since.

Over the last 8 years, most women who feel drawn to appearing in porn have either tried camming or “OnlyFans” style sites (or posted nudes on Reddit, or similar). They’re often heavily influenced by what’s trending on OnlyFans and similar platforms (the top sellers there being modern-day pornstars), meaning when models come to us they have a clear vision of how erotic content should look… which is very unlike what our customers want to pay for!

So, the biggest change is managing models’ expectations. Used to be, models were happy to go with our vision on a shoot. Now, we need to work harder to help models understand what it is we’re paying them for. No worries, we get there—but looking back over 23 years, that’s one of the biggest changes.

What’s stayed the same? Customers still want to feel a real connection with a person.

Related Read: Female-friendly Porn 101: What It Is and Where to Find It

On scrapping its camming platform ‘Playdates’

Interviewer/Jenna Owsianik: I read you shut down Playdates because it both wasn’t profitable and you couldn’t justify paying to enforce the new management regulations from credit card companies after the PornHub débâcle. What did this experience teach you about the camming industry and why was Playdates never able to cover its costs?

Our camming product (“Playdates”) was never as successful as we wanted 😕.

We tried to run it the way we felt the camming industry should be run (summarised as “substantive connections”), but it turns out, that’s not what people want (despite saying they do)!

We also don’t have a big enough audience to market to —we might have 100 customers online at any one time, and maybe only a third of them are interested in camming. We only had a few models a week doing free shows and pay-per-minute shows, so the chance of a customer and a model being online at the same time was slim.

I’m not hopeful for our future. We’re a dinosaur now—23 years we’ve been operating is like 89 in porn years!

Garion Hall, CEO of abbywinters.com

We worked with models to make unique shows for each of the weekly one-hour free sessions, you know, they’d rollerskate around outside with their laptop filming, and take requests, then move to their lounge room to undress, then have a bath—all while talking to customers and touching themselves sexually (usually culminating with an orgasm).

The pay-per-minute chats were popular, but we never had the scale to make it work—models set their own per-minute fees and we shared 70% of the revenue to the model, and we just did not have the volume to cover the staff required to administer the system (let alone the additional auditing the banks required).

Models and customers enjoyed it, but as it was free (in an effort to gain new customers), it was a cost-centre for us, and the “live” nature meant it only had limited reach to our small audience (we tried recording them, but then we got complaints like “uh, why isn’t this in 4k 60fps?”, meanwhile the model lives in a country town in New Zealand with some shitty internet connection…).

The camming industry is a race to the bottom currently, and it is getting worse for models and for customers. I predict there will be some kinda renaissance with premium offerings coming in the next few years, but the cost of developing a platform that supports that approach is prohibitive.

Related Read: Sexting Site Arousr on Keeping Adult Chat Legit

On the future

Interviewer/Jenna Owsianik: What do you expect for abbywinters.com over the next decade and how do you foresee the company evolving alongside the development of new digital technologies?

I’m not hopeful for our future. We’re a dinosaur now —23 years we’ve been operating is like 89 in porn years!

We’re still heavily focussed on improving quality and bringing new ideas to our customers, and they appreciate it… but it’s difficult to compete with the firehose of content that’s available for free on Tube sites. And I am not sure how much quality matters sometimes. It matters a lot to some people, but others just want hot young girls doing anal or whatever, and so long as the camera’s in focus, they’re not so fussed about content quality or technical quality otherwise. So then I wonder if I’m on a useless Don Quixote mission…

Anyway, I am not sure we can retain enough paying customers to support ourselves. We have thousands of loyal customers who have been with us for a long time, and we take their trust very seriously… but we won’t cut costs in a way as to reduce quality, so we’ve got some tough decisions to make in the coming years.

We looked into making VR content—it suits our genre, helps customers connect more with models. The capture and post-production technology is reasonably advanced and market-ready, but the viewing technology is still a pretty immature, fragmented market, lots of glitches, unreliable/non-standard hardware. Third parties who offer “layers” to “solve” those problems (at a very hefty cut).

I am more excited by the possibilities of improving content quality than technical quality. 4k’s nice, but it’s definitely not 4x better than HD, you know? But imagine if we could make shoots 4x sexier? That’s worth investing in! We have extensive onboarding and ongoing training programs for our Shoot Producers, and our focus is most on making new training modules, and supporting our Shoot Producers in them. That’s what I spend more than half my time on.

What does the phrase ‘ethical porn’ mean to you?

For the record, this is how we present this to prospective models.

We have a very clear vision on what ethical porn is, and it’s quite different to our competitors. We do not claim to be “inclusive” (what most people mean when they use the term “ethical porn”). We select models based on how suitable they are for our brand and our paying customers, which is inherently exclusive.

Our tagline is “Human friendly porn”, meaning we make porn that is nice for the producers, models and customers.

We believe being ethical is a few key things: Information symmetry, consent, and fair payment.

• Information symmetry: Prospective models need to know what they’re “getting in for”. We provide extensive information to prospective models and existing models.
• Models do several calls with our staff before their first shoot, to learn our expectations and to support their decisions. Our goal is for models to be fully informed – some models resent that, but it’s a principle we stick to always. We always present the risks as clearly as the benefits.
• Consent: Consent is essential in anything sexual, we need everyone to be doing their best to make material our customers enjoy. We do an extensive Pre Shoot Briefing. to support models. Because of our “information symmetry” approach, we never have problems with consent on-set.
• Fair payment: We have a formal process for reviewing our model fees each year, and increase them to stay in the top 20% of companies paying models. We pay for all flights and accom, transfers, food allowances and similar expenses.

We think that’s what ethical porn is all about, and it’s woven into the fabric of our strategy, our standards, our policy, our training, and our processes.

What does it mean to be a creator of ethical porn?

It helps me, and our staff and contractors (and their families) sleep well at night.

It attracts new models (most of our new models are referred by previous models), and find new staff.

What does it mean to be a consumer of ethical porn?

Paying ethical porn producers—us or others!

*The responses from this email interview have been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.