Not true.

Generally, a female porn actress will make less than $1,000 for a standard scene and a few $100 more if it includes anal. Male porn actors make around $200-300 for a scene.

Also, it's not "an hour or so of work". A scene can take up to 6 hours to shoot, and a full day never includes more than two or three scenes. There's also time spent pre- and post-shoot.

Of course, the famous actor will make more, but just as in every other industry, there are very few of them compared to the total.

As someone who has actually done porn, I can confirm this. It optimistically works out to more like 200 an hour (for women), or at least that's how it was about 5 years ago. Obviously rates varied based on how rich the company was, but you couldn't be picky because work was spotty. I once only got paid $200 for an hour of caning which left my butt bruised for two weeks.

The worst part is that it's a lot of work to find constant work unless you have a really good manager or you're famous. Sure, the hours are short, but I found that having stable hours and not having to live shoot pay check to shoot pay check is preferable, even if it's a considerably lower hourly wage.

(Much like contract programming work!)

Please dont take this the wrong way, I'm curious to know, what motivates someone to do porn? was it money or fantasy?

A little bit of both.

While Jarin's estimate was a bit high, that's still a fantastically good hourly wage. The average Goldman Sach's employee makes $520k/year. Guesstimating that they have a 60 hour work week and 4 weeks vacation (fairly typical for the big banks), that's about $180/hour.

Like contracting, there is a lot of non-paid work: finding the next job, doing back-office stuff, paying a manager, etc.

This is why individual contractors charging $100-200 an hour are not actually making $250-500k a year.

Right, but they get paid continuously, porn stars only get paid when they have a gig- there is no way they're making as much once you consider the hours spent trying to get work.

If you have enough stamina to have sex 60 hours a week, chances are you already have a midget riding you and caning your butt while you run around in circles chasing a mechanical rabbit.

Hacker News: Correcting assertions about anal compensation rates since 2011.

Sure, it can take 6 hours if you're doing more of a scripted type scene, but every shoot I've been to has been ~45 minutes of filming cut down to a 30 minute scene in post (it was all reality porn). There was definitely some waiting involved though.

I'm not saying you're wrong about the rates (and it does seem like they've dropped a lot lately after looking into it), but I'm either grossly misremembering or we paid a premium for our talent. I believe it was the latter, because the company definitely liked to spend money.

I'm not sure how representative they are, but kink.com, a bdsm themed porn network, pays significantly less than that. Closer to ~$100-$300 per hour according to their site NSFW http://www.kink.com/k/model_call.jsp?c=1 NSFW

I am 80% sure that data is false, from my memory of porn industry Ask Tells on something awful and AMAs on Reddit. Males get paid very little.

My data is based on my memory of working at a porn company. Maybe we overpaid.

Apparently those rates have plummeted due to the wide availability of free amateur porn online.

Edit: Interestingly, whereas open-source code expands the market (and rates) for programmers, open porn destroys the market for porn stars...

>Interestingly, whereas open-source code expands the market (and rates) for programmers

Has this been proven?

The the role of open porn on the decline of the industry is highly overvalued. the huge availability of free commercial porn in many forms is probably a more important factor. even without open porn , i bet the situation would have been pretty similar.

Ah, then you know more than me, ignore my interruption.

I'm sure it varies very widely depending on whether the male is a name star, an experienced professional, or just some guy who is psyched about the opportunity.

I'm not sure how current the quoted figures on Wikipedia are, but if they're accurate it looks like the agencies we used add a little bit of a premium to the rates (most of our guys and girls came from adult talent agencies). I can definitely see how non-agency guys wouldn't be able to command as much though. I guess a lot of them have to start off "gay for pay" just to break into the industry.