Grabby Awards have announced their 2024 nominations – it’s as chaotic as ever.
There’s always a bit of scepticism surrounding the various industry awards that exist in the adult entertainment universe. They primarily seem to be a bit of an in-crowd marketing exercise, handing out the trophies to whatever the sponsors are promoting and the performers that are favoured by the studios putting money into the event.
It seems to be a fairly wide consensus that industry awards events provide a fairly narrow perspective on the wider ecosystem of gay porn and don’t reflect any sort of objective view of who is doing well in the world of adult entertainment.
Which brings us to the Grabby Awards.
Originally founded by Grab Magazine, the Grabby Awards have been around a while but any pretence at credibility seems to rapidly diminishing.
In recent years, the Grabbys have hosted two award ceremonies – one in the US and one in Europe. The Europe event will be held at the end of April and the US event will be held at the end of May.
Unlike the fairly opaque decision-making of some of the other gay porn awards, the Grabby Awards are entirely fan-voted. While it is great to encourage fan-engagement into celebrating the work of performers, this style of fan-voting seems primarily to be a data-collection exercise.
There’s also an enormous number of performers nominated. In the Performer of the Year category for the US version, there’s 26 guys nominated. In the Pornstar of the Year category for the US version, there’s 50 guys nominated. Pretty much every category is similarly stacked.
Nominating lots of performers serves a couple of purposes – it helps to encourage performers to attend the events, spreads the net as wide as possible in terms of encouraging fans to vote and boost those data-collection returns, and supports the marketing of the event.
There is some value in being nominated for an industry award – the world of gay porn is incredibly competitive, any opportunity that performers get to demonstrate that they’re putting out quality work and worth paying attention to is going to be welcome. But if everyone is nominated, what are we celebrating?
If you want to support your favourite performer, just subscribe to their fan-subscription channel and reward their hard work in a meaningful way.