by Rich Moreland, April 2019
This is the fourth installment in our porn stars and camming series from the 2019 AVN trade show.
Whenever I need honest, no holds barred opinions on the adult industry, Derrick Pierce is one of my go-to performers.
The porn vet is among the handful of male models who are sexually reliable performance-wise and insightful with their understanding of the business.
Above all, the Massachusetts native is an industry gem, a performer with acting skills.
While on the floor of the trade show, I stopped by the Adult Time booth to say “hello” and asked Derrick for his take on porn and camming. We later met up in the press room.
Photos are credited to Kevin Sayers.
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Money
“The AVN show, and the trade shows in general, are now becoming more cam affiliated,” Derrick begins.
The driving force behind the change is money. It’s persuading the cam networks like MyFreeCams (MFC), Chaturbate, and Live Jasmine to market their product to a wider audience.
“They’ve always done very well, but now they’re putting a lot of money out to shows. As you can see, they are sponsoring AVN. I don’t know what the number is, but I guarantee you it’s seven figures,” Derrick speculates.
“Nobody even had that [financial] ability before. I don’t even think it was on the table.” He includes the big production studios like Evil Angel and Jules Jordan in that mix.
In reality, cam networks make big bucks “damn near printing their own money in some cases,” he says, and that enables them “to do things the production companies can’t do.”
Face Time
For Derrick, however, the situation presents a problem for the cam companies.
“The dilemma is nobody gives a shit about a cam girl. Not in person,” he says.
In other words, for the cam fan “to stand in front of them, to see them at the show” is no big deal, the certified martial arts instructor implies, because he has already chatted with his favorite girls online.
In fact, Derrick asserts, the show comes up short for the fan because he “probably gets more face time with them (cam girls) when he’s online than he ever would at the show.”
And, it would be more private.
Derrick’s honesty continues,
“Nobody cares about Tiffany451blue,” because fans don’t attend the Adult Entertainment Expo to see her.
“When you come to the trade show, you want to see Asa Akira, to see Abella Danger, Casey Calvert. All of these legitimate porn stars.”
What MFC does is accommodate a couple of hundred cam girls to attend the show with the promise of floor time, rooms, cool stuff. Just “enjoy have a good time,” he says. That’s “all it is.”
Ford Focuses
Derrick Pierce compares the cammer scene at AVN to stopping by a car dealership and seeing “rows and rows of Ford Focuses.”
“Cam girls are a bunch of Ford Focuses. They’re not doing what the professional girls are doing and, in some cases, I think some of those girls think they’re better than the porn girls. ‘Well I don’t do what they do, I’m a cam girl.’”
Derrick challenges that with “You’re not better.”
“Here’s the deal,’ he explains. “When you come to these shows you have two hundred and fifty cam girls to see and you have fifty of the top female performers in the business to see. Who do you think they’re lining up for? The porn stars because there’s something nostalgic, because there’s something unattainable” about them.
It’s like a “fantasy about who they are because whatever you’ve trumped them up to be in your head is who they are when you see them.”
“But with a cam girl, you know them. You know her favorite color is blue and she hates jalapeños or whatever her deal is, right? Cause you had time to socialize with them. So that’s the deal and I don’t think they’ll ever be on the same level,” Derrick concludes.
However, he comments that AVN and other trade shows now face a dilemma.
“Do you continue to take this money from the cam companies, which of course you’re going to? You’re in business to make money. But then do you phase out the production companies because they don’t contribute the same financial endeavor as the cam companies?
“When it comes to the trade shows, fans are lining up for porn people, but the cam people are the ones that are printing the money.”
Just a Cam Girl?
Derrick raises the question of how to merge the two, if that is at all possible.
How is the cam girl of the year chosen? For porn performers, it’s easier to debate who is the best this year because each girl has a body of work. The only reasonable way to select the winning cam girl is by counting up the dollars she makes over the year.
“Whoever made the most money wins,” he says.
As for joining camming and porn under one umbrella, Derrick believes the “level of separation” between the two will always remain.
To back up his point, he makes this observation.
“I just found out today that [on] MFC all the girls are solo girls. They don’t do anything with guys or boy-girl scenes or anything like that. I don’t understand that.
“Chaturbate has a couple of guys here, I noticed. How do you put them into play? Obviously, there’s a market for them too. MFC doesn’t have that, I don’t think.”
Our team’s photographer Kevin, who follows cammers, interjects, “We learned that they only allow women.”
“So, they’re completely man-less [and] it works for them, obviously,” he says.
“However they’ve designed this, it’s flawless in my opinion because they’re killing it. They’re making so much money.”
Regardless, the question lingers for Derrick Pierce.
“Are you really a porn performer? Or are you just a cam girl?”
