Introduction

I had an interaction recently with a poster on a kink-related subreddit with one of their moderators that got me thinking about this, and I decided to write about what it takes to create high-quality BDSM content to give some perspective on it. Without too much detail, the crux of the interaction was the moderators of that subreddit banning content creators and production groups from posting their content or interacting with the subreddit in any way (except for their friends and the moderator, who is a content creator) while still allowing people to post their content and links to pirated versions of that content. I recognize that this is a complex issue for many people and don't seek to create any harassment or judgment of the group or its moderators but to provide context for the work I do and what is involved since it's not often front and center what it takes to make these beautiful pieces of erotic art happen.

The Equipment

While many people can make their independent productions and personal content using a phone, tripod, ring light, and a USB microphone, which costs about $400 for the accessories and $1,300 for the high-end phone needed, most professional content requires a much more significant investment in gear and technology.

Lighting

Lighting professional content is the most critical component of the "look" of the production, and even a "dim" or "dark" production usually requires the same full-level professional lighting setup as a brightly lit production. It's also important to recognize that to get the most out of a camera sensor and fully record the range of color, light, and shadow needed for post-production, the space must be much brighter than a standard room. In addition, there's something called the f.stop of the lenses - which I'll get into more detail with later - that causes an inverse relationship critical to the production's lighting level. Specifically, the more light you allow into the lens, the smaller the range of distances from the camera sensor will be able to be in focus: the Depth of Filed or "DoF". This means that to get the whole area you want in direction, you need to restrict significantly the light coming into the lens, which requires even brighter lighting than what an average person would use.

The light level is measured in Lux: Lumens per Square Meter. A 60-watt incandescent (12-watt LED) bulb has about 800 lumens. A 100-watt incandescent (17-watt LED) has nearly 1,100 lumens. Since most shooting areas cover about 3 meters high and 8 meters wide at the shot point, and you need to cover about 150% of your shooting area to have room to move while shooting, the site to be covered with light is about 36 square meters. Typically, you would want the overall median light level to be about 2600 Lux (calculating this is outside the scope here), which means a total light source level of 93,600 lumens. This is only achievable with standard lights. As a result, to create a professional-level look - and have the flexibility to cast shadows and show dimension as you like - you need some mighty and adjustable lights. There are also batteries, light boxes, light stands, barn doors, reflectors, grid directors, power supplies, weak controls, and on-camera lights needed to support these professional lights. Typically, 3 to 5 mornings of 2 to 3 configurations are needed per shoot. The expected cost of this equipment - even with today's relatively low-expense equipment compared to 15 years ago - is about $2,500.

Wardrobe

While a lot of content is shot with basic lingerie, street clothes, and nudity, the reality is that some specialty clothing needs to be purchased for use in any form of fetish or BDSM content. This includes a few dozen latex pieces, a few leather pieces, and some specialty costumes & lingerie. Overall, purchasing this falls about 30% on the studio and 70% on the performers, with many performers running into situations where they need help to provide a particular wardrobe piece to be able to take a range of gigs. As a result, studios typically have a range of costumes, latex pieces, and everyday shoes in a few sizes, running about $5,000 to $10,000. Performers are usually on the hook for:

• Schoolgirl outfit
• Nurse outfit
• Nun outfit
• "Professional Outfit"
• Cocktail Dresses (3-5)
• Latex Hood
• Corsets (3-5)
• Jewelry (Goth, Punk, Casual, Preppy, and Fine)
• Seifuku
• Cosplay Costumes (5 costumes)
• Girl-Next-Door (no logos or identifiable T-shirt, Jeans, leggings, &c)
• Lengire (3-5 sets per week)
• Stockings (3-5 sets)
• Athletic Wear (5 outfits)
• Leather jacket
• Latex Top
• Latex Panties
• Latex Skirt
• Latex Dress
• Latex Hood

The wardrobe will also need a "refresh" to prevent too much repetition between shoots with the same production company and identifiable replication and staleness between different production companies. As a result, it will generally need to be re-purchased every 3 to 6 months. Fortunately, most performers have access to clothing swaps where they can exchange pieces required with one another to save money. This cuts the cost by about 40% to 60%, depending on how often the performer works and how many they can access.

Still, this means performers are on the hook for a wardrobe that's easily $7,000 initially plus another $3,000 to $4,500 every 3-4 months for around $18,000 in the first year and about $15,000 every year after that in wardrobe expenses.

Also, remember that only about 20% to 30% of this will ever be tax deductible. The IRS rule is that if the clothing *could be used by any person reasonably** in an everyday outfit* it does not qualify as costume attire. This is why most performance art types (stage, television, &, etc.) have wardrobes owned by the production studio: a business can always write down clothing expenses as non-personal attire). Some performers incorporate to be able to do this; even so, it's an iffy area, and it can be a challenge to deduct most of the wardrobe pieces.

Camera

Professional camera equipment is expensive. High-end adult productions need semi-professional to professional camera gear. Whether depreciated over time or rented for each shoot, the cost per shoot is similar; the only significant difference is how the taxation accounting works for the studio. The typical cameras used are in nine important parts: - Tripod - Rig - Microphone - Boom Microphone - Audio Recorder - Recording Media - Monitor - Lens - Battery - Camera Body

While modern updates have allowed some variation in this (using high-end camcorders groups a lot of those together but also increases the base cost of the camera), truly professional shoots tend to use semi-pro to full-professional mirrorless cameras or entry-level box cinema cameras. These bodies range from about $2000 to $8,000. Lenses are usually either premium photo lenses or cinema lenses. I've seen lenses ranging from the Sony FE 16-35mm f/2.8 GM lens to the Zeiss CP.3 15mm T2.9 lens. Overall, this means the lenses run $2,300 to $6,000 each. It's common for there to be a need for 2-3 lenses per camera, depending on the situation, so the lens kit can efficiently run $7,000 to $22,000. Batteries range from $600 to $1,000 depending on the camera used, the battery consumption rate, and the types of batteries needed. Recording media for 4k 4:4:4 RAW video runs about $100 per hour of video registered. Since shoots are 4 to 12 hours, you need about $800 of recording media per day of shooting before you archive the footage. Typically, 5 days per week for $4,000 in media expenses. Audio recorders, mics, and mic booms are another $2,500 to $5,000. Monitors are $500 to $1,200. A hand rig, cage, and controls can range from $300 to $8,000, with most coming in around $2,000. A decent video tripod runs about $450.

This means the camera setup per camera on set will likely be anywhere from $5000 at the shallow end to $40,000 at the high end. While most productions only run one camera on stage, that's still a significant expense.

Furniture & Gear

We all know how expensive kink gear is. Now imagine needing to own all of the possible pieces, plus a few dozen customizable parts, and accumulating a new piece of significant equipment every week or so. Ultimately, each shoot can require between a couple hundred and a couple thousand dollars in gear acquisition costs.

Editing Rig

Editing professional video footage differs from using IMovie to cut together your videos. Video software licenses range from $300 upfront to $250 per month. On top of that expense, the storage cost per day of video is about $250 uncompressed, and the compressed archival footage can cost about $20 per film. The system memory will generally need to be 64Gb to 128Gb, a top-end processor is required, usually $700 in whatever generation is current, and a single GPU is often not enough to handle the color grading, retiming, cutting, rendering, and post-processing that's required for the footage to look good. That usually means about $3,500 to $5,000 in graphics cards alone. Plus, a motherboard to handle all that as well. Usually, a rig will cost about $5,000 to $12,000 depending on the grade of footage being worked with (full uncompressed 8k down to compressed 1080P) and released (either 4k AVI compressed or 1080p compressed AVI).

People

Rates for the people on set are also significant. Typically, a tiny production crew will be: - PA $200 to $350 - Camera: $200 to $750 (depending on if they provide equipment) - Sound: $0 to $250 (depending on if they use a boom or only on-camera audio) - Director/Producer: $500 to $1000 - Editor: $250 to $500

Then there's the performer rates: - Top Male: $400 to $800 (depending on if they are no-fluids, oral, vaginal, anal, B/G, B/B, or trans) - Top Woman: $600 to $1400 (depending on if they are no-fluids, oral, vaginal, anal, B/G, G/G, trans, or the partner is black/Asian) - Trans Performer: $500 to $1200 (depending on if they are no-fluids, oral, vaginal, anal, B/G, G/G, trans, or the partner is black/Asian)

Additionally, each performer beyond the second adds about $200 to each performer's rate. So if there's a 3-person shoot, that adds about $600 to each performer or $1,800 to the total shoot billing rate; this can vary a fair bit depending on the production company, the level of contact, any special activities, &c.

Then there's the add-on costs. Confident performers will command higher rates (top-name talent), or specific activities warrant a high premium (fisting, double-anal, DP, airtight, first anal, first B/G, &c). Sometimes, a performer will need to be flown in, adding $500 to $1000 to the expense; sometimes, they'll need reimbursement for testing costs: about $300.

Location

Shooting locations aren't accessible. If the studio owns its site, they must pay rent, mortgage, electricity, sewer, water, &c. If they don't, rental rates can range from $200 per day to $5,000 per day, depending on the location value, size, and the permits required.

Adding it all up

Overall, this means that per shoot a studio can easily spend $7,000 on people and amortize $250 on camera & sound gear, $1,200 on location, $50 on lighting, and $1,000 on equipment & consumables. This means every shoot can run between $7,000 and **$18,000.

What does this mean for the community

With the added hostility from payment processors, audiences, and legislative bodies, generating revenue from content creation - especially BDSM content creation - has become incredibly difficult. Payment processors set your cut-rate based on the type of business you are and the type of content you create. As a result, BDSM content gets rated as the highest risk & highest rate content. Usually, this means between 15% and 30%, with the expectation being over 20% of all transactions taken as a "respectability tax." Overall, if the site creates 4 to 8 films per month, that can mean anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000, adding the taxation applied (being generous at 18.5%), and you get a needed subscription income of $38,000 to $138,000 per month to stay afloat. This is where the colossal cost of content subscriptions can come from. Even a medium-sized site charging about $35 per month could need 1000 regular and dedicated subscribers to break even before paying for IT overhead, customer service, taxes, accounting, and all the other fixed business costs that come with running any business. It can also add another 50% to the price, requiring 1500 subscribers before the site operator even gets to take home a salary.

Unfortunately, with the rise of PornHub and so many shady upload sites allowing pirated content to be posted in full for free: usually hosted on servers in countries that do not qualify for copyright enforcement claims from the former colonies/Europe, and you get a situation where very few people exist anymore to fund the creation of content. Ultimately, we've seen the real significant impacts over the last 5 years quite starkly: Kink.com shut down production efforts and now outsources all new content responsibility to small independent creators who struggle to make a decent profit. Insex & Intersec interactive has been sold off due to various pressures, and content production has stopped. Sites meant to continue their legacies have struggled to find payment processing and had a fair level of challenge getting their projects off the ground. On top of that, viewers and consumers of content feel an even greater entitlement to never pay for the highest grade of content. They even argue that "it will never run out" and "production will always continue" despite the trend to the opposite. Going further every day, the OnlyFans style content sites tighten restrictions on content, further making BDSM and Fetish content harder and harder to host, increasing paperwork requirements more and more to limit the ability of creators to work with more than one site and to work with people who work on other sites, and then reduce creator shares of the content sale prices at every opportunity. Ultimately, BDSM content is being wiped off the internet both due to conservative action groups' lobbying and due to the actions of our community in how content is supported and consumed.

I am still determining what the future will yield. I am hopeful that I and the creators I know in the industry will persevere against these pressures and create a new generation of excellent content and sites while achieving financial stability and success from our efforts. It's going to take the whole community to do so, though. I know the economy is tough right now for a lot of people, but if you ever have some free money and are thinking of watching some content, please consider subscribing to the sites you consume your content from or to one of the new sites that are starting up with some fantastic range! I still need to get my sites online, so I'm not going to request a subscription to my stuff right now, but there are plenty of creators here with unique locations and libraries; there's never been a better time to send some support their way!