Remember when you were little and you’d go to birthday parties at the Build-A-Bear workshop, and you’d spend all afternoon picking out your little bear and his little outfit and his little accessories until you had a customized stuffed animal of your very own? Well, Customs4U is like that, except with porn.
Created by CEO Tim Stokely, Customs4U lets you order personalized porn videos that are tailored precisely to your tastes, from the model to the genre to the duration to the film quality. You’re then asked to write a (less than 999-character) summary of what you’d like to see in your video.
If the model accepts your price and your conditions, you’ll have your custom video uploaded to your dashboard online at a specified delivery date. The site also features a more ambiguous “offers” section, where you can offer a performer literally anything you want, from an hour-long private Skype session to a meeting for coffee, for a set price. (They can also make an “offer” to customers, although a quick perusal of the website indicates that this isn’t a very popular option).
Customs4U didn’t exactly invent the concept of the customized porn video: Adult performers have been making custom clips for their fans for years, usually selling them on their own personal websites. But Stokely’s website is one of the first centralized custom adult clip sites of its kind, allowing fans to commission personalized clips from a wide range of models, from dommes to MILFs to TS performers.
Sites like Customs4U are all part of the adult industry’s general shift from selling pre-recorded content (most of which has been pirated and uploaded to tube sites), to offering more interactive services like cam shows and paid dates. “The industry isn’t about shooting films anymore,” adult performer Teal Conrad recently told CNBC. “[Now] it’s about being really personal.”
Camming in particular has been heralded as the future of the adult industry, as performers can often make more money doing cam shows than they can shooting scenes. But Stokely doesn’t necessarily see cams as the be-all and end-all of interactive porn. For one thing, a cam show is an inherently ephemeral product. While it’s certainly possible to record them, the quality usually isn’t great, and with dozens of other people in the room, fans don’t usually get one-on-one attention from performers.
Custom videos, Stokely says, give you the best of both worlds: They let you interact one-on-one with your favorite performer, in the form of a pre-recorded clip you can watch over and over again (like It’s A Wonderful Life, except with custom-made porn).
“The real beauty of a custom video, is it can be watched again and again,” Stokely recently told Betabeat. “It is a collector’s item, if you like. And in our view, a custom video offers a far more personal experience than interacting with a webcam girl, who is no doubt permanently checking the time, waiting for your credits to expire, or worse trying to entertain you, along with several other fans at the same time.”
H/T Betabeat | Photo by Lies Thru A Lens/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)