Why everyone from PornHub to SinParty owe Homegrown Video

Amateur porn is one of the most popular porn categories on the internet, with thousands of searches online every day. Porn wasn’t always this way – it took Homegrown Video to make amateur porn happen.

Before the 80s and easy access to audio and visual equipment, making porn was the reserve of studios paying actors to fuck on film. There were old ideas about porn that had to be adhered to.

Then came along a guy, a video camera, and a mom-and-pop shop in California. The rest is, as they say, history – and that’s what we’ll be looking at here. We’ll check out:

• The background to Homegrown Video
• How Homegrown Video developed
• What changed about porn with Homegrown Video
• Where Homegrown Video is now

So you can really know your history of porn.

Where did Homegrown Video come from?

In a land before smartphones and megapixels, there was video cameras. For generations the preserve of photographers and cinematographers, 1963 saw the first home camcorder than came in at $30,000 – not exactly accessible.

Around the same time, we had the Golden Age of Porn. In the 1970s, explicit video content became much more widely distributed, with cinemas showing it and celebrities like Andy Warhol and Bill Osco getting involved.

The public began to get a taste for porn as western countries started to liberalise their porn laws. On the back of these social changes came Deepthroat, the porno that made Linda Lovelace a global star and an appetite for porn that needed to be satisfied.

Into the 80s, and home camcorders became somewhat cheaper and easy to carry round. Much like rule 34 of the internet, where there is a way to record an image; porn will be made.

We’ll never know who decided to film their own sex sessions first, but we do know the first person to make a living selling homemade sex tapes.  

The story of Homegrown Video

One day, a grocery store owner called Greg Swaim took his camcorder to a sex party he was going to. He and his wife started to rent out these videos under the counter at their shop in San Diego.

With that, a whole new genre of porn was created – amateur.

It grew into something much more than the orgies that the pair went to. Swaim called for submissions from loyal viewers, with an end card on all the rentals stating:

Send in your home videos and earn up to $20 per minute

Time to reassess your pricing, anyone?

The content came pouring in and Homegrown Video became an underground sensation. Amateur couples would video their fucking and Swaim would distribute it.

By 1993, he’d not been managing the place too well. Farrell Timlake – porn stage name Tim Lake – had regularly been sending over videos for the last year and when Swaim finally got to them, he couldn’t offer any cash because Homegrown Video was bankrupt.

Timlake did what any wannabe porn entrepreneur would do; borrowed some cash off his mother. He bought the whole operation and moved the company into cable TV, DVDs, and the fledgling internet.

The company is still going strong, taking submissions from people all over the world and paying out anything from a couple hundred to a couple thousand dollars.

How did Homegrown Video change porn?

Before Homegrown, porn was professional. It wasn’t always the highest quality, to be sure, but there was a whole operation with a producer, director, cameraperson, and talent purposely setting out to make a porno.

Homegrown Video turned the industry on its head. The popularity of sex tapes made by real people in their own bedrooms showed that there was another way to make porn. There wasn’t a need for flimsy plots and bow chika wow wowww music. Viewers were keen to get straight into the action.

The people in these videos didn’t have to have perfect figures or be able to convince viewers they were cumming. The sex was real and people wanted it.

How does this link to the modern phenomenon of men and women selling porn on sites like SinParty?

Swaim and Timlake found the market and proved it was lucrative long before the internet. Big production, big boobs, and big dicks weren’t necessarily to everyone’s tastes and when porn went online.

People who sell their own sex tapes online are the 21^st Century equivalent to the thousands of people who send Sawim their sex tapes. The people who rented the tapes under the counter from San Diego to Venice Beach, Florida are the retro MyParty subscribers, wanting to see authenticity.

Is Homegrown Video still around?

Yes, Homegrown Video is still very much a thing. The company website offers access to the complete Homegrown Video back catalog with more than 30 years of content for just $14.95 per month.

They still actively accept submissions as well. You can send your home sex tapes and get paid for the content you make – the money will depend on the quality and the monetization options they have for it.

In the Homegrown Video store, you can also go vintage and buy real DVDs of the amateur porn people send in. Buying one is like buying a piece of history and you’ll be part of the longest running porn series ever.

Homegrown Video in the history of porn

As soon as camcorders were easily accessible, people were making their own porn. It took a San Diego store owner to harness the power of the video camera and invent the category of amateur porn.

Without Homegrown, sites such as SinParty and PornHub simply wouldn’t exist – no one would be aware of the demand for content by people having sex in their own bedroom.

Want to get in on the action and have full control of the porn you make? Sign up to be a creator on SinParty.