Amateur Porn Stars Make Bank. Web site offers real people chance to make real money by having real sex. 22, 2008— - Antoinette is 25 years old. She is an interior designer. Once in a blue moon the cigarette will be real, but far more often than not, it's herbal. This is the case even if the actor is a smoker, and it's for several reasons.

Jan. 22, 2008— -- Antoinette is 25 years old. She is an interior designer from Baltimore with a boyfriend and a degree. She describes herself as 'a pretty normal woman.'

But twice a month she sets up a camera, takes off her clothes and with her boyfriend makes amateur pornography movies under the name Sexy Secret. For what she describes as about 20 minutes worth of 'work' she makes $500 to $600 a month.

'I'm not a porn star. I don't want to be a porn star,' she said. 'I'm a pretty normal woman. I don't wear makeup that often. I'm 5'6 and 140 pounds. I'd say I'm nice looking, sure, but otherwise I'm pretty average.'

Despite not being a porn star, Antoinette's films are explicit displays of hardcore intercourse that if released in cinemas would earn a 'XXX' billing.

While plenty of amateur pornographers or exhibitionists have posted their work online for free, some do-it-yourself pornographers are now posting videos to a new section of the video-sharing site XTube.com — and making money on it.

With so much free media available on the Internet, sites have long struggled with how to get users to pay for content, whether it is Facebook, the Wall Street Journal or the band Radiohead.

As it has in the past, the porn industry is showing others how to make the Internet profitable.

XTube, which also offers thousands of free videos, thinks it has solved the problem of getting people to pay for porn by offering users something different.

'Everybody has got free porn,' said Justin Arilan, XTube's sales and support manager. 'How you keep users on your site and how you monetize the site is the real challenge. We think we've done that here.'

Xtube's business model hopes to harness popular Web 2.0 innovations like wikis and social networking. People who typically view free porn will be more willing to pay, the company believes, if they can get to know the models, form relationships and play a role in directing the action filmmakers produce.

The audience pays 50 cents to $2.50 to view the short homemade porn flicks.

Those who post the videos receive 60 percent of the revenue after processing fees. Beginning next month, posters will receive 50 percent of revenues.

'I get lots of comments and compliments,' said Antoinette who asked that we use her middle name for this article and who said she usually shields her face in her porn videos. 'We get lots of suggestions from people for things they want to see, things they want me to do.'

Arilan says the Web site earns $140,000 to $160,000 a month, most of which comes from sales of studio-produced video-on-demand movies. But about 40 percent comes from the amateur section. The site receives about 56 million page views a day, he said.

XTube is making lots of money, but most of the amateurs posting videos probably can't yet quit their day jobs, said Stephen Yagielowicz, senior editor of XBiz, an adult industry trade magazine.

'These people are not porn stars in the traditional sense. They're actual folks that are trying to make a supplemental income. They're just trying to earn a few hundred bucks a month. There are lots of voyeurs and lots of exhibitionists out there. People have been using the Internet to fill those needs since its beginning, now it is giving them a way to make money,' Yagielowicz said.

That is true for Antoinette, who said that making the films fulfills a voyeuristic fantasy, but that the money doesn't hurt either.

'It started out as a voyeurism thing and that was the fun part. At first we were skeptical that it would really work out, but then we got our first check and realized this is real, we're really making money,' she said.

Online porn is estimated to be as large as a $14 billion industry, and the studios that have long controlled content are already feeling the pinch of the homemade competition.

'There is no doubt that there is real money in user-generated and user-shared content,' Yagielowicz said.

But the term 'amateur' has long been co-opted by the studios. When the first true amateurs began posting images of themselves online in the early days of the Internet, porn companies found they could create similarly stripped down Web sites that looked like they had been created by the girl next door but that were really produced by the companies.

'Many so-called amateurs are not real amateurs. Most young voyeurs these days are posting their pictures on places like their blogs and MySpace. The studios have already figured out how to dress up real porn stars like the girl next door on single-model, subscription-based sites, so I would expect they'll do the same on user-generated, revenue-sharing sites,'said Yagielowicz.

Joseph Jaffe, a media consultant and author of 'Join the Conversation,' a book about social media, said that porn companies have always been technology vanguards.

Movie Prop Money Laws

'From an innovation standpoint, porn, like gambling, has always been ahead of the curve. They're always forced to adopt new practices and ways of monetizing. Whatever the porn industry is doing today, that's where everyone else will be in five years,' he said.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StageMoney

Go To

To create the illusion of massive wads of cash, TV and film producers don't take real $100 bills and put them on the front and back of a stack of $1 bills (or even just pieces of paper cut to size) but instead use fake bills.

This is also seen any time where the character shows a bunch of bills. Rather than going to the bank and getting, say $5,000 in real money, letting the actor use it for the scene and then putting it back in the bank, they use Stage Money.

There's actually a cottage industry that makes fake money to be used in films, that looks just enough like the real thing that a casual viewing doesn't reveal that they're fake... for one example, take a look here. Users of Poser software can freely download U.S. money props, including various coins and four different currency styles. The 20th century bill props are not intended to imitate genuine currency.

It isn't legal for print media to use real money, to the point that boxers with accurately sized money on it were once seized. So the magazine ad would show part of a hundred dollar bill, but not all of it. Because the law says that only the government can print money. There is no law against showing it on TV or in the movies, since you can't cut out the bills and use them.

In Britain, if a TV game show has a prize draw with cash prizes and illustrates them, the £10, £20 or £50 notes will be shown in full but with something like 'SPECIMEN' superimposed. In some other parts of the world, bank notes illustrated in print media (such as ads) often also have that SPECIMEN marking.

Do They Use Real Money In Movies Based

Examples:

• The setting of the 2005 adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was designed to look like America to Britons and like Britain to Americans, so it made use of 'guinea' notes that didn't look quite like either a $10 bill or a £10 note.
• One short from The Three Stooges has them needing to get the ransom for a starlet. They resort to some bills found in a room marked 'Property'. It didn't say whose property, of course. Guess what the roll was identified by the crooks as...
• Averted in the production of the 1978 film 'The Brink's Job.' A scene showing the main stars wallowing in a pile of money used ACTUAL currency borrowed from a local bank. The money was carefully counted and recounted by guards at the beginning and end of each filming day, and police were on hand to double check everything.

• In Making Money, the Ankh-Morpork Times broke the story of Moist von Lipwig's new invention, paper currency, by averting this trope. They printed true-to-scale images of the front and back of a bank note, which (as Vetinari observes) surely sent most of the city scrambling for scissors and glue.
• In The Phantom of the Opera, Erik (the titular Phantom) demands 20,000 francs per month from the managers of the opera house. They put the money in an envelope and give it to the head usher, who has a duplicate (provided by Erik) up her sleeve that contains stage money. She puts the duplicate in Erik's private box and slips the real one into the back pocket of a manager's dress-coat while he is wearing it. When the managers return to their office, Erik sneaks the money out of that pocket by way of a trapdoor built into the floor.

• Doctor Who had some specially commissioned notes made with portraits of David Tennant and (producer) Phil Collinson on them for The Christmas Invasion. This was for legal reasons, though, and now these props go for a pretty penny on eBay.
  • The reason Doctor Who used fake notes may have been not so much that they weren't allowed to use real currency, but that the scene involved a cash machine malfunctioning and shooting banknotes across the street. There'd be too much risk of the notes becoming damaged or getting pocketed by the extras who scrabble across the street collecting the notes. It's not an offence to show currency on British TV, but it is an offence to damage or destroy it.
• Notably averted in children's arts and crafts show Art Attack, which used to have a segment where presenter Neil Buchanan would create a huge picture out a themed selection of everyday objects; a picture of a house might be assembled from the inventory of a builder's merchant, for example. On the occasion with which we are concerned, the producers somehow persuaded the Bank of England to loan them a truckload of real £10 notes to create a portrait of the Queen of England.
• Harry Enfield's early character Loadsamoney's 'wad' used the first method described above, being two real £10 notes with lots of appropriately cut newspaper in between.
• To someone who goes to Chinatown often enough, it's obvious when someone is using Chinese Hell dollars as stand-ins for American dollars, but otherwise the designs are quite similar. They were used like that in an episode of the Australian series Pizza.
• On the NBC game show Scrabble, players could earn bonus cash by placing letters in colored squares on the gameboard and then immediately guessing the word in play. Host Chuck Woolery would then pay out the bonus in pink or blue 'Chuck Bucks,' fake bills printed with his picture.
• On Three on a Match, contestants tried to win $1000 by trying to uncover the left half and right half of a $1000 bill on the game board.
• On the 2000 revival of 21, losing contestants were given bundles of stage money as they left the studio. Host Maury Povich gave $1,000 to challengers, while champions' winnings were brought out on a silver tray and counted into a tote bag.
• Cutthroat Kitchen made use of this trope. At the start of every episode, the four competing chefs were each given $25,000 in prop money (with host Alton Brown's picture) to use in bidding on sabotage items.
• Leverage, being a show about criminals, naturally has quite a bit of this. One commentary has director Jonathan Frakes mention that the prop master asked him if he wanted to use to use 'the good money' for the episode. Producer Dean Devlin indignantly pointed out that, as a con and heist show, they have a lot of briefcases full of money.
• Mr. Bean: In the spin-off book Mr Bean's Diary, there is Mr Bean's hand-drawn picture of a £10 note, with 'ten pouns' (sic) written on it. Below this, it says: photocopy this ten million times, then SPEND it.'
• The VH1 reality series Ton of Cash used this trope as a central feature. A group of 14 contestants received $1 million in prop $1 bills, bundled into 167 bricks that weighed 12 pounds each, and had to physically carry as much of it as they could through a series of challenges ranging from Malibu to Las Vegas.

Can They Use Real Money In Movies

• The Stephen Sondheim musical Road Show involved piles of cash being literally thrown into the air until they carpeted the stage, so that audience members in the front few rows were able to catch loose bills. Needless to say, it wasn't real money.

• In The Beatles episode 'Money,' John sews the boys' concert take in Ringo's pocket while they tour Coney Island. Ringo is followed by a mysterious stranger and loses the money during a chase. The stranger turned out to be George, yanking Ringo's chain. John reveals that he kept the real money and sewed stage money in Ringo's pocket. But when John takes out the stack from his own pocket, it turns out to be the stage money.
  Ringo: (tossing the stage money in the air) Very droll.
• The Dick Tracy Show episode 'Funny Money' has Hemlock Holmes busting a gut chasing Stooge Viller and Mumbles, who have stolen some theater receipts only to find out at the end it was stage money.

• During the Victorian era, forging a banknote carried a hefty sentence, but making something that looked a bit like a banknote didn't. So forgers would create notes that read 'Bank of Engraving' instead of 'Bank of England', and could try to pass these off as real currency.
  • Modern anti-counterfeiting laws no longer follow this limited definition of 'forging' but instead focus on whether or not the 'currency' is likely to fool a person into believing it's real. In court, the fact that a person was fooled into believing that fake notes were real would be taken to be evidence that the notes are counterfeit and illegal, regardless of any minor differences between the fakes and the real thing.
  • Additionally, even passing off fake currency as the real thing is generally illegal, regardless of how transparently fake the forged notes may appear to be. After all, the person receiving the notes may be a visitor from another country and therefore unfamiliar with what local money looks like.
• A related trick in real life: the 'carnie roll', a roll of what appears to be high-denomination bills. The first and last ones are high-denomination bills, though all of the ones in-between are $1 bills.
  • This trick is difficult to pull off successfully with currency from countries such as Australia, England and Canada (to name just three) because the different denominations are not only slightly different sizes, but also different colours.
• RJR Props, one of the leading providers of money props produces two styles of fake money: 'Standard grade' which looks real enough from a distance, and 'high grade' which is more convincing up close, therefore it is only printed on one side to keep anyone from spending it.