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Comment by rudiger | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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