One of the best ways to sell porn on the internet is to give your website a unique ethnic flair. If your goal is to build a great “Japanese girls” site, for example, you’ll find plenty of content that you can license for this purpose. After all, much of Japan’s popular culture also has a big audience here in America and in Europe. If your preference is for the girls of America’s south-neighboring nation, it’s not hard to find sets of steamy hot Mexican girls that you can use to build your own online shrine to Latina beauties. As America’s population of Mexican-Americans increases, so too will consumer appetite for this unique brand of porn. But what happens when you can’t find content for the ethnic group that you want to feature? One of the most elusive brands of ethic porn is that which features Indian models.Thanks to a general lack of worldly knowledge that was prevalent when Europeans first explored and settled America, it’s now hard to refer to the “Indian” ethnicity without also offering an explanation as to which “Indians” one is referring. While American Indian adult content is also quite difficult to locate, the ethnicity being referred to in this story is that belonging to models whose roots trace back to India. Very few webmasters build sites that feature real Indian models. Yet the scarcity of real Indian porn sites shouldn’t be read as an indication of demand. For a variety of reasons, adult pictures and videos featuring real Indian models can be elusive.

When YNOT learned that one of its members was active in producing Indian content and building Indian-themed adult sites, we were eager to communicate with him. Turns out that a brief email exchange with Joe A, the webmaster behind sites like UK Indian Girls, Ravishing Indians and Sahara Gets Dirty, provided us with a fascinating story that we would like to share with the rest of the adult community.

A resident of the UK, Joe A started his first adult website in 1999 after growing tired of a career in the fashion industry. Assuming his fashion design skills would translate well to the business of building adult websites, he put up his first AVS site as a kind of hobby. Like many adult webmasters, he looks back on his first site attempts with pained amusement.

“Looking at them on the archives.org site, God they were bad,” Joe A laughs.

From day one, Joe A’s websites have focused on Indian models. Having recently broken up with an Indian girlfriend, Joe A found himself attracted to Indian porn. In 1999 you could count the number of Indian pay sites on one hand, so finding a good Indian porn site wasn’t easy. Joe managed to round up enough Indian content to build a couple of sites for Adult Check and Age Check, and his first month as an adult webmaster netted him a decidedly modest $25.00.

“I thought that it was fun to do,” says Joe A. “I didn’t have to work too hard as I had money in the bank, and so I built a few mores sites over the next couple of months.”

Due to the scarcity of Indian content, Joe A found that he often had to mix in models of other Asian ethnicities in order to fill out his sites. He soon built his first pay site, and also built several free sites and galleries that he used to up-sell surfers to his fee-based sites. The money improved… slightly. As he grew more serious about the adult industry he also grew more serious about focusing on Indian models.

“I even removed all my old oriental content and replaced it with the little Indian there was to be found, and made up the rest with Latinas who could pass for Indian,” says Joe A. “Cheating, I know, but at that time there was almost zero Indian, so I had no choice.”

By 2001 Joe A had introduced himself to the online adult community through the Internext trade show, and his business was growing. He had convinced both Adult Check and Age Check to add a category just for Indian sites. Then, out of the blue, Joe A was contacted by one of the UK’s terrestrial TV channels that had heard about his work in the Indian niche and wanted to feature him in one of their broadcast shows. The catch? They wanted to film Joe A while he was photographing one of his models, and Joe A had only licensed content to this point, not produced it.

Not wanting to pass on a golden opportunity, Joe A purchased his first digital camera and frantically searched for an Indian model who would be willing to be seen on television participating in a nude photo shoot.

“A model was found two hours before the film crew were due to start filming and so I had suddenly become a photographer,” says Joe A. “Not even a poor amateur, I must add, as I had no idea at what I was doing. Thank god it was digital and so I didn’t have to send the results off to be processed.”

With the first shoot behind him, Joe A was sold on producing as much of his own content as he could. That later proved especially important when the other primary supplier of his content was arrested in India in 2002. Adding video production to his skills, Joe A suddenly found himself quite popular. But sitting on a good thing and knowing it, he wasn’t especially eager to part with the rights to his in-demand unique content.

“I’ve had most of the major sponsors contact me to sell them my material,” says Joe A. “Knowing that if I did that it wouldn’t be exclusive to me, my own sales would drop, I have quoted them $5.00 a raw image and $10.00 to $20.00 per minute of raw video footage to compensate for the future losses. They have all run away saying that they can buy it for a maximum of $1.50. They have done this, and if you look at any major sponsor’s Indian sites you can’t tell one from another as they can only buy the same content.”

According to Joe A, many “Indian” pay sites are conning their members with models who are not really Indians.

“They use Caucasian and black models with a bindi on their foreheads and say they’re Indian,” Joe A explains. “Surfers get fed up with this and so the few of us who have genuine Indian sites suffer the backlash.”

One of the reasons why Indian content can be so hard to find is because Indian models often come from conservative family backgrounds. Even in the UK, finding Indian models willing to pose nude for an internet website isn’t always a simple matter.

“Most of the models I’ve worked with are estranged from their families or are rebelling against their upbringing. One hated her father so much she wanted to send him her first ever hardcore video where she even did anal,” says Joe. “The latest rebel is the model Sahara, who I’ve been working with and promoting for fifteen months. She only decided in August to really go for it and she quit her full-time and high-paid job for the adult business. We’d started building www.saharagetsdirty.com a month or two earlier and we launched it ten days after she started modeling full time. She is now one of the most in-demand models in the UK, and I’m sure that if she doesn’t get fed up soon she’ll make a visit to the States.”

In addition to his work with Sahara, Joe A is negotiating with AEBN over a deal that could land some of his video works on AEBN’s impressive pay-per-view online network. His newest site, www.ukindianvideos.com, will be an adult store for Indian videos open to consumers.

In the meantime, Joe A expects that he will continue to find new Indian models on the strength of his reputation in the UK, even though convincing them to star in adult content will often be a challenge.

“Many of the girls I meet are interested in working with me but are worried about their family finding out,” he says. “The strangest thing is, most of my models have been Muslims, who are the strictest of all.”