Ed Powers is a living porn legend. Most everyone producing adult videos these days owes at least some debt of gratitude to the outspoken, genial, pony-tailed porno-pioneer. His unique manner of lensing XXX-rated content helped to revolutionize porn production; he's been an advocate for the rights of female stars in a too-often uncaring industry; and Powers' funny, laid-back attitude and the impossibly hot, new-to-porn girls in his videos have made him one of the most recognizable people in adult.
AVN Online caught up with Powers at his Chatsworth office and chopped it up about his Internet site, the most glaring problems facing the porn industry, and where he manages to find all the smoking young women he partners with on camera. "I'm not putting on any airs," Powers says. "I'm just being me, and EdPowers.com is me. No matter how many names someone wants to call me, it's me."
Since his start shooting in the early '90s, Ed Powers has released hundreds of videos and starred in thousands of scenes with some of the sexiest women ever to fornicate on camera. He's shot so many different series that even Powers himself has trouble naming them all, but most have revolved around a tested formula: shooting new-to-the-business girls in an amateur, point-of-view style; hence the name of his most well-known series, Dirty Debutantes.
Ed's video "formula" - a brief interview with a sexy girl followed by a strip tease and sex - has become so ubiquitous over the last few years that it's easy to forget the style largely originated with a single guy. "I'm not like the ex-Vice President, going on about how I invented the Internet, but POV shooting is what I did," Powers says. "Guys and girls that are shooting POV - where did it start?"
Part of Powers' mass appeal comes from Average Joes being able to identify with him. Along with the POV shooting and acknowledgement of the camera that encourage a personal relationship with the onscreen action, Powers has an everyman quality to him; he's not an intimidating, buff dude with bulging pectoral muscles and a perfect smile. He's a regular guy you'd meet on the street, a little pudgy (by his own admission), not particularly handsome, a little goofy - but, somehow, he manages to have sex with some of the hottest women in porn.
"Ed's the luckiest guy in the world," says Bruce Benevento, the vice president of Operations of WebQuest, the company that administers Powers' Website and markets his content to Webmasters. "He gets all of these beautiful girls who want to be first-time porn stars, and Ed's the one who introduces them to the industry and kind of deflowers them. That's a very appealing product. Ed's a character."
The deflowered girls are a huge main draw of Ed's movies (and Website.) After all, amateur-style videography and an appealing dude wouldn't sell to consumers if the girls weren't pistol-hot and ready for the nastiest action possible. Ed has worked with some of the top names in porn in some of their earliest scenes, including Asia Carrera, Cherry Rain, Ashley Nichole, and Shane, as well as hundreds of other girls whose first and only scene was performed with Powers. He is typically modest when asked how all the girls come to be in his productions: "It's a lot of word of mouth, although I also book girls from agents and managers. I respect agents and managers."
It might not seem like it at first, but the Internet and Ed Powers go together like Joanie and Chachi. Powers' video production work may pre-date the World Wide Web by several years, but his POV shooting style has become practically the textbook for how Internet sites shoot content. His Website, www.edpowers.com, has an exceedingly simple formula for success. "We're trying to build a site that has Ed, Ed, and more Ed," explains WebQuest's Benevento. "The site is pure Ed, in all his glory."
"EdPowers.com has been around for six or seven years," Powers explains. "It started out to be a site where you could see what I'm doing. Now, it's grown to be more than that. It's grown more personalized now, much more involved with Erotic Online. I'm part of their family, and I enjoy that."
Designed by EOL and administered and marketed by Webquest, EdPowers.com is a true group effort, "EOL and CashQuest, [WebQuest's affiliate department] really listen to me," Powers says. "I had the most fun at Internext. Bruce Benevento, Larry Pollack, and Jason from EOL are great guys, and they listen. When I speak, it's important to listen to me, not just hear me."
It might be a group effort, but Powers makes sure to put his personal stamp on every page of the site. Surfers who happen onto EdPowers.com are greeted with a personal video message from the sites' namesake, immediately setting the friendly but still raunchy tone for the Web surfing experience. Right from the opening splash page with it's goofy caricature of Ed and text that promises "Ed is just your average guy who just so happens to get laid for a living," it's obvious to consumers that they are going to get as much Ed Powers as they can possibly handle.
"It's a very targeted market," Benevento explains. "But it's got broader appeal, too. It bridges some niches, because you've got this amateur thing going on, but you've also got a celebrity twist to it, because Ed is truly a celebrity and brandable. He's a very well known, high profile person within the adult community, and within the consumer community as well."
So far, the formula of presenting "Ed, Ed, and more Ed" has been working even better than originally anticipated. "When we at WebQuest first started, we got this client and started to produce the back end of this by pulling together a Website and reaching out to the affiliates. We started looking at the conversion ratios and the traffic," says Benevento. "For an adult Webmaster it's all about your conversion rates, and after the first couple of days we actually called up the folks over at EOL communications and we said, 'You know, there has got to be something wrong here. I think you've got a fraudulent Webmaster somewhere, because the Ed Powers traffic is converting under one in 50. In other words, we were getting 300 clicks to the site and it was converting every fiftieth click. That's about as good as it gets. And really and truly, we thought it was a problem. The folks who were on the Ed Powers site explained to us - it's just a very, very loyal following of people."
Powers says he hasn't changed his shooting style for the Internet, but he has embraced the technology in a way that a lot of others have not. "I've come to the conclusion that I'm a content provider, not just a video shooter," Powers says. "I'm a video streamer. I'm up with the technology now, and everything I do, I have the Internet in mind. I believe that every member of my site is as important as the video man, as the video buyer. The environment these days is not always the television. The environment is the computer."
Of course, it's not all dollars and cents to Mr. Powers. In spite of his on-camera joking and humor, Powers has become known for taking hard, outspoken stances on some of the most thorny issues that confront adult. "Some people say, 'Don't bring attention to the negative,'" Powers says, "But I say, let's eliminate the negative. It doesn't have to be there. What I feel is terrible is when human rights are threatened. When girls are being threatened or they're being made promises that are not being kept. When manipulation is being done. Manipulation does not belong in this industry, and I don't care what people may think of me."
Powers isn't just blowing smoke when he talks about protecting the welfare of the girls. He's putting his money, and his hard work, where his mouth is. "I am working on formulating the Talent Agents and Managers Coalition, the TAMC," Powers says. "I'm talking with Adult Star Management, World Modeling, Pretty Girl International, and Beautiful Models to solve some of the problems going on nowadays. The first thing I'd like to approach are these pimp guys out there that are marketing girls to people without a test. In one instance I caught one girl who came out positive for an STD who came through one of these pimp guys, who told her, 'You have to have sex with me' and turns her over to a guy he knows doesn't have an STD test.
"We have to protect all the girls' welfare, because that's how we protect all of our welfare... If I find out they're showing a test that ain't real, I'm going to report it. The Internet is not a cove for bandits, crooks, criminals, debauchers, or people who profit from extortion."
Webmasters interested in becoming Ed Power's affiliates should log onto www.cashquest2.com.
