Internet Adult Film Database

Online database of US pornographic films and actors

The Internet Adult Film Database (IAFD) is an online database of information pertaining to the pornography industry: actors, actresses, directors, studios, distributors and pornographic films.

The predecessor to IAFD was email and FTP accessible database of adult film actresses called Abserver that had been created by Dan Abend in 1993. IAFD was started by Peter van Aarle, who had collected data on adult movies since 1981, when he began keeping notes on index cards on adult movies he had seen or were reviewed in Adam Film World. In 1993, he began contributing to the Usenet newsgroup alt. sex. movies, where he met Dan Abend. The two exchanged databases and began work on a WWW based database. Van Aarle later collaborated on this Web database with Ron Wilhelm, who went by the pseudonym of "Heretic". The first version of the IAFD was brought on line in 1995 by the programming efforts of Wilhelm, who used the project as a training ground for SGML programming which he was learning in college. After Wilhelm left the Internet to join the military, the site eventually fell victim to link rot. In the fall of 1998, Van Aarle was at a trade show with Jeff Vanzetti, who asked if Van Aarle would be interested in resurrecting the IAFD — this time under its own domain. Vanzetti was looking for a project on which to teach himself on line database programming using SQL Server, and this seemed like a natural fit, since they were both co moderators of the newsgroup rec. arts. movies. erotica (RAME), and members of the newsgroup would often lament about the passing of the original Internet Adult Film Database. In 2011, he was inducted into the XRCO Hall of Fame. On March 1, 2007, the IAFD rolled out information on over 18,000 gay titles and some 39,000 gay performers. According to Vanzetti, IAFD adds about 500 new titles a month and processes thousands of corrections—corrections that anyone can submit for review. IAFD takes user corrections though forms on the site. The forms are not automated and corrections the site receives are manually updated after having been reviewed by the site's staff. IAFD has a "team of editors" that exercises editorial control over what's posted on the site: "If it's submitted by a fan of the performer and the working editor trusts the submitter, it gets listed. If it's published by someone else, it might get added—we are skeptical of user generated sites since anyone can submit anything to them regardless of accuracy and then it becomes 'fact'. Otherwise, no data." The academic and non academic writing community has also used the site's information to varying degrees. Included in the statistics released were the number of new titles added that year (9,384) and a ranking of who the busiest performers were. The report also included site data, such as that it was visited by 20.7 million unique viewers and that visitors to the site viewed nearly a quarter of a billion pages. An editor at AVN magazine stated: "[it] underscores the fact that a lot of people not only like porn but want to research information about movies and performers." Considered the "Internet Movie Database" of the adult entertainment world", the site is also routinely quoted or referenced by the majority of the industry trade publications, such as Adult Video News (AVN) and XBIZ.

On February 14, 2013, a study was released by freelance journalist Jon Millward that sampled the data from 10,000 actors (7,000 women and 3,000 men) from the site to, among other things, compile a profile of the "average porn star" as well as generate some statistics about adult industry actors based on IAFD data. The study was written about several days later on Playboy. com. It showed that the typical female porn star was a five foot five inch brunette with B cup breasts. The survey covers roughly a 40 year span of the adult industry and presents statistics on categories such as age, race, state of origin, chosen screen name, biological data (height, weight, hair color, etc. ), and the type of sexual acts performed over an actor's career.