May 17/05: Is Reality Porn Over?

Answer: In my dreams.

More detailed answer: In the first place you have to define what is meant by "reality porn". Good luck. I remember trying to sort out some of the confusion when we were nominating for the PRA Awards last year. We had a category for Best Reality Site, which obviously leads to the question "What is a reality site?" I think we settled on something like "a site featuring all-amateur theme-oriented video." 

I know it sounds awkward, but you try coming up with a better definition. It's not easy.

What I wanted to use as a definition was "a site with lots of cheap video." 

Whatever definition you decide on, what you can't say is that it has anything to do with reality. As far as I can figure out the "reality" business just came from drawing a shaky parallel to shows that were becoming popular on TV at the time, like Survivor. Of course these shows were no more real than anything else on TV. What they were was unscripted, temporarily popular, and very, very cheap to produce. 

So I wasn't totally joking when I suggested "a site with lots of cheap video" as the definition of reality porn. What most reality porn sites have in common is the fact that they shoot a lot of video on the fly, with very low production values and whatever talent they can find. In other words, it's cheap. And it looks even cheaper because few of these sites offer "DVD quality" downloads. But by keeping costs down they are able to produce in volume. You basically get quantity over quality. In fact you get quantity squared because most reality porn sites are a part of a network (like All Sites or OxPass). It's sort of like one-stop shopping at the supermarket of porn. Usually you'll find every niche getting some coverage. Some of them even throw in a tranny and a gay site as well. I can't understand why, but they do.

But to return to the question: Is reality porn over?

Not over, yet, but certainly no longer the force they once were. 

For one thing, the novelty has worn off. Remember when these sites first got started, how funny they seemed? Now we know the funniest things about them are their names and some of the shit you read on the tour. Once the fucking starts . . . it's not so funny. In fact it's pretty dull and repetitive. The concept becomes nothing more than a template. Then there's the glut factor. There is just so fucking much of this stuff out there. The market is saturated--and whenever that happens, in any industry, you can expect some kind of correction. And finally there is the quality issue. While it's true that more is always more, a real gap is starting to widen between what the best porn sites are offering and what the reality pimps are pushing. While I still want these guys to be sleazy, I'd also like to seem them start pumping some of their vast profits back into the production side of things. Do they have to always shoot all their movies on the same couch? Do all the girls have to be covered in so much ink? Can I get video that plays back at anything better than 500 kb/s? Do all my photo galleries have to be blurry screencaps?

Reality porn used to be the cutting edge. Now it's going to have to learn to catch up.

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