The trends reflect the increasingly intense tastes of the highest spending, most engaged consumers.

https://logicmag.io/play/my-stepdad's-huge-data-set/

While a lot of people (most likely you and everyone you know) are consumers of internet porn (i.e., they watch it but don’t pay for it), a tiny fraction of those people are customers. Customers pay for porn, typically by clicking an ad on a tube site, going to a specific content site (often owned by MindGeek), and entering their credit card information.

This “consumer” vs. “customer” division is key to understanding the use of data to perpetuate categories that seem peculiar to many people both inside and outside the industry. “We started partitioning this idea of consumers and customers a few years ago,” Adam Grayson, CFO of the legacy studio Evil Angel, told AVN. “It used to be a perfect one-to-one in our business, right? If somebody consumed your stuff, they paid for it. But now it’s probably 10,000 to one, or something.”

There’s an analogy to be made with US politics: political analysts refer to “what the people want,” when in fact a fraction of “the people” are registered voters, and of those, only a percentage show up and vote. Candidates often try to cater to that subset of “likely voters”— regardless of what the majority of the people want. In porn, it’s similar. You have the people (the consumers), the registered voters (the customers), and the actual people who vote (the customers who result in a conversion—a specific payment for a website subscription, a movie, or a scene). Porn companies, when trying to figure out what people want, focus on the customers who convert. It’s their tastes that set the tone for professionally produced content and the industry as a whole.

By 2018, we are now over a decade into the tube era. That means that most LA-area studios are getting their marching orders from out-of-town business people armed with up-to-the-minute customer data. Porn performers tend to roll their eyes at some of these orders, but they don’t have much choice. I have been on sets where performers crack up at some of the messages that are coming “from above,” particularly concerning a repetitive obsession with scenes of “family roleplay” (incest-themed material that uses words like “stepmother,” “stepfather,” and “stepdaughter”) or what the industry calls “IR” (which stands for “interracial” and invariably means a larger, dark-skinned black man and a smaller light-skinned white woman, playing up supposed taboos via dialogue and scenarios).

These particular “taboo” genres have existed since the early days of commercial American porn. For instance, see the stellar performance by black actor Johnnie Keyes as Marilyn Chambers’ orgy partner in 1972’s cinematic Behind the Green Door, or the VHS-era incest-focused sensation Taboo from 1980. But backed by online data of paid customers seemingly obsessed with these topics, the twenty-first-century porn industry—which this year, to much fanfare, was for the first time legally allowed to film performers born in this millennium—has seen a spike in titles devoted to these (frankly old-fashioned) fantasies.

Most performers take any jobs their agents send them out for. The competition is fierce—the ever-replenishing supply of wannabe performers far outweighs the demand for roles—and they don’t want to be seen as “difficult” (particularly the women). Most of the time, the actors don’t see the scripts or know any specific details until they get to set. To the actors rolling their eyes at yet another prompt to declaim, “But you’re my stepdad!” or, “Show me your big black dick,” the directors shrug, point at the emailed instructions and say, “That’s what they want…”

So my interpretation here is that it's not that there's suddenly a huge spike in people discovering they love incest in 2017 where they were clueless in 2016 or that they were all brainwashed to no longer enjoy vanilla that year, it's that that is when the hidden oligopoly turned on various analytics and started deliberately targeting those fetishes as a fleet-wide business decision. And this was because they had so thoroughly commodified regular porn to a price point of $0, that the only paying customers that are left are the ones with extreme fetishes who cannot be supplied by regular amateur or pro supply.

They may or may not have increased in absolute number compared to pre-2017, but it doesn't matter, because everyone else vanished, and their relative importance skyrocketed: "If somebody consumed your stuff, they paid for it. But now it’s probably 10,000 to one, or something.”

(For younger readers who may be confused by how a ratio like 10000:1 is even hypothetically possible because 'where did that 10k come from when no one pays for porn?', it's worth recalling that renting porn videos used to be big business that would be done by a lot of men, and it kept many non-Blockbuster video rental stores afloat and it was an ordinary thing for your local store to have a 'back room' that the kiddies were strictly forbidden from, and while it would certainly stock a lot of fetish stuff like interracial porn, it also rented out tons of normal stuff. If you have no idea what this was like, you may enjoy reading "True Porn Clerk Stories", Ali Davis 2002.)

I think there is a similar effect with foot fetishes & furries: they are oddly well-heeled and pay a ton of money for new stuff, because they are under-supplied and demand new ones. There is not much 'organic' supply of women photographing their feet in various lascivious ways; it's not that it's hard, they just don't do it, but can be incentivized to do so. (I recall reading an article on Wikifoot where IIRC they interviewed a contributor who said he got some photos by simply politely emailing or DMing the woman to ask for her to take some foot photos, and she would oblige. "send foots kthnxbai" apparently works. And probably it's fairly easy to pay for or commission feet images/videos: almost everyone has two feet already, and you can work in feet into regular porn easily by simply choosing different angles or postures, and a closeup of a foot won't turn off regular porn consumers either, so you can have your cake & eat it too. Similarly for incest: saying "But you're my stepdad!" is cheap and easy and anyone can do it if the Powers That Be tell them to in case a few 'customers' will pay actual $$$ for it, while those 'consumers' not into that plot roll their eyes and ignore it as so much silly 'porn movie plot' framing as they get on with business.)

Incest is not a subcategory of sexual violence, and it's unethical for unrelated reasons. Then again I see the appeal of sexual violence porn but not incest porn, and maybe incest appeals to other people because they conflate it with violence?

Many older titles have dead URLs, but of those that remain (typically more recent videos), I find that "pure SEO effects" are not very common, and that the title is a reasonable descriptor of the video contents.

Both...

"Hot blonde girl gets fucked"

and

"FAMILYXXX - "I Cant Resist My Stepsis Big Juicy Ass" (Mila Monet)"

... could easily both be completely accurate descriptors of the same video (assuming that this Mila Monet person, or her supposed stepsister, is in fact a "hot blonde girl").

Furthermore, the second could be rated as an accurate descriptor of a video that didn't actually have any content indicating that anybody was anybody's stepsister, just because the video contained somebody who plausibly could be somebody's stepsister. You could retitle a video that wasn't originally supposed to have a "stepsister" theme at all, and still get an accurate rating. The only thing that makes it a "stepsister" video is the (probably usually false) claim that it's one, and that claim can be made equally well by the title and the content.

One time in my sexology discord, some people were arguing that incest porn was super popular, and I was skeptical because this proposition conflicted with my survey data. I tried scraping data from some porn site (I think PornHub?), and when I sorted videos by number of views, I found that the top-viewed videos were often incest-themed, but as I looked at the cumulative viewcounts, the fraction of views to incest-themed porn dropped as I increased the sample size.

I don't know for sure but my guess is that there was a supply/demand imbalance in the data, such that the fans of incest had their views concentrated into a smaller number of videos (that were thus more likely to have extraordinarily high view counts) because people weren't producing "enough" incest videos to meet demand. But that overall preference for incest porn was lower than what one could guess from the top views.

I haven't looked through your materials so I don't know how my method of scraping in order of decreasing view count compares to your method. Did you get a complete/comprehensive dataset somehow?

I think there is a place for a general retrodictive/predictive theory of fetishes and sexual and pornographic preferences, but this article is awfully empirical, inductive, why, Baconian, even, if I may say so myself. I couldn't imagine doing model-free learning in this domain.

If you had claimed that there had been a surprisingly smooth increase in trends toward incestuous and violent pornographic video titles, I might have believed the implication here.

The scariest outputs of my model of the interaction between relatively constant human sexual psychology and ever-changing modern human environments are highly specific, conjunctive, superstimulating fetishes, of which incest and nonconsent only scratch the surface, by dint of their nonconjunctiveness; this also seems to retrodict my anecdotal experience of the strong correlation between strength and specificity of sexual preference, but there might be multiple clusters there.

But I strongly suspect that discontinuous, or sharp and continuous, jumps, in the apparent pornographic preferences of consumers, are almost always a sign of a sudden change in the beliefs of producers about consumers, and not a sharp change in consumer preferences per se.

Is the data reliable? I just did a search on PornHub, xHamster and iXXX for the following keywords:

violence, incest, rape, torture

Results:

Pornhub returns a warning "Your search could be for illegal and abusive sexual material...etc" (it is a longer description), returning no videos for 'violence', 'incest' and 'rape'. It does return results for 'torture' though.

The cases is somewhat similar for xHamster and iXXX, except they do not return any special message for the first three, but also do not return any results. They do work fine with violence though.

It does seem there is some official or unofficial policing.

Broadly this is because of professionalization: a shift from amateur, Youtube-style porn to professional studios with an interest in the bottom line.

I don't think content becoming more and more extreme has anything to do with them trying to maximize money, I believe the shift to more and more extreme content is because people need more stimulation to be satisfied. (Seeing a video of a guy giving away $10K at first might stimulate you enough to watch, but after a while seeing a video like that is no longer stimulating enough so you need to watch a video of a guy giving away $100K to feel stimulated enough to watch).

I'd imagine that porn videos will continue on this trajectory and get more and more extreme, like everything else in life as extreme=more stimulation and with the more and more stimulation we receive the more stimulation we require the next time.

As sadly, our brain constantly needs more and more stimulation to be happy (hedonic treadmill)