Posted
by
timothy
on Tuesday July 03, 2001 @10:49PM
from the but-what-about-meeting-nice-normal-girls dept.

mrsalty writes: "Salon is running an interview with ex-dotcommer Philip Brandes. For a modest fee ($140 US) Brandes will teach you the secret of making money in the skin trade.
" Ah, a nice respectable trade -- every parent's dream for their business-school dropout child.

Yes, definitely. He did say he was "driving a Lincoln Navigator" two weeks after starting, but to me, that sounds like he got the money for the first lease payment, or maybe he squandered his past savings based on optimism that income from his porn sites would pick up. I've been in the biz 2 years, and I don't hear of anyone making $40K in their first two weeks. Much more common are people following his general approach (thumbnail galleries posted to free link sites), griping on the affiliate's boards that they're only making $100 this month, when last month they made $200. (You're paid per signup, so income varies a lot). I'm not exaggerating, either...that's probably the most common discussion thread on affiliate program message boards, and the numbers being discussed are usually in that range.

There are people making good money. I do fairly well, using my own techniques, but nobody's teaching them. If they were, my biz model would rapidly fall apart. This guy's approach is getting ever-diminishing returns as the market saturates. And as others have said, it's not easy money in any case. Unless you registered/bought/stole "sex.com" or a similar domain a few years ago, and can just run a banner farm. (Fuck you Gary, Rick, and Jennifer - lazy bastards!!;-)

Maybe a few fringe elements go after things like drinking, but most stick to limiting themselves to "underage drinking" or "drinking and driving." Things that most people would agree are not a good idea because they endanger others. Nobody has tried to ban alcohol in my city/state in my lifetime. They have tried to ban porn on multiple occaisions though. It is far and away the most persecuted of all the things he mentioned.

The portrayal and images of women (and men:)) in porn cause the viewers of porn to have a skewed sense of women or men in general.

Really? Define "sense of women" and "sense of men." Then tell me how much the viewing of porn will skew this sense. How did you measure it? Is the amount of skew variable in port viewers? If so, what level is skew is "acceptable"?

This is not a troll. These are fair, scientific questions that I think you should be expected to answer.

Perhaps it's just the porn I've seen, but it almost always has a hard edge and women are (seemingly) being used and treated solely as sex objects. I know, I know... it's a porn... they're supposed to be sex objects..

Yes, and so what? Isn't any sex partner a "sex object" in some way? Even in a "loving, committed relationship" people are getting off on eachother.

The portrayal and images of women (and men:)) in porn cause the viewers of porn to have a skewed sense of women or men in general. If Jenna Jamison enjoys her day at the office, there is nothing wrong with that (It's probably a lot of guys and girls ideal job). It's what the viewer gets from the porn that worries me. Perhaps it's just the porn I've seen, but it almost always has a hard edge and women are (seemingly) being used and treated solely as sex objects. I know, I know... it's a porn... they're supposed to be sex objects...

Firstly, I apologize for my argument being one sided. It is possible for porn to be derogatory to males as well. However, because I don't swing that way, I don't have a first hand account.

Secondly, I am far from homophobic. I argee with you. Whatever two consenting adults do in privacy (regardless of a home) is their business.

Your statement that I can't say "porn is derogatory to women (or men)" without being a woman is crazy. You're as bad as Jerry Falwell if you believe that. The moral majority will always win if no one can empathize with the minority!

Porn, for all the grief it gets, has done more for our society than anyone realizes. Telephone sex hotlines are the reason our nation's phone system is even somewhat reliable. In the early days of video casette players, porn outsold everything else by a large margin, quickly establishing a standard and ironing out the kinks technologically for the more morally upstanding offerings to come. Streaming video? Another porn technology. Porn sites were streaming live video YEARS before RealMedia thought of it. Not that it worked very well, but it did work and the operators made a bundle.

There are two things that make the world go round: money and sex. The two have a very close relationship.

No no no!!! you don't hava javascript pop up your own page, you pop up 12 other pages, all of whom (for some reason) pay you $.10 per pop-up. That way even if no one is dumb enough to join your shitty site or some shitty AVS, you stell get a few bucks off of them. And since google puts your site up when someone searches for "asian anal bestiality teens" or whatever, you're getting hundreds of very very irritated viewers a day!

For an example of this idea taken to its logical extreme, look at the Middle Ages. During this time it was considered a "sin" to expose the body -- even to one's self. The result? Bathing and basic hygiene were virtually nonexistant.

A sin to expose the body? I think you are confusing the Middle Ages with the Victorian Era. People in the Middle Ages "exposed" themselves all the time -- until very recently, in fact, most people slept in the nude. It wasn't until the rise of capitalism that some clever fashion designer invented pajamas and convinced the western world that they were mandatory somnambulic attire.

As for bathing, it's quite true that it didn't catch on until relatively modern times. But keep in mind that knowledge of indoor plumbing was very poor at that time. (Yes, ancient civilizations such as the Romans and Babylonians had indoor plumbing, but interest in ancient manuscripts was not renewed until the Renaissance.) For most people, having a bath was not as convenient as turning on the hot water tap.

Despite attempts to make it play out as something different, adult sites are just business. Same principles apply: develop a desireable product or service, then market it and sell. I don't want to get into the morality issues about working in the adult industry, because that's really a personal choice; but the people in the industry are businesspeople.

Certainly, one cannot look at this market and believe it to be a shortcut to riches. It's not. Plus, the market *is* saturated. I think the hardest part about this particular industry is the marketing. Look at the saturation in the search engines alone.

I'm of the opinion that this course could be titled "General Internet Business Principles", but that naturally that wouldn't get people fighting to get in the door.

Picture this. An aesthetically challenged male trawling the internet for those few porn pictures he hasn't got, jerking off over his key board.

This male is what is known as a sad git. If you want to be a sad git too, please consume a lot of porn.

There is nothing wrong with porn. A healthy sex drive is exactly that -- healthy.

And what has porn got to do with a healthy sex drive? A sex drive is, I would have thought, something that makes you want to go and have sex, not something that encourages you to pull the cord. Face it, porn is for those with no personality who can not get laid, ever.

Would you like to limit your ability to pick up women? Then tell them how much you enjoy porn. In fact, suggest that you'd like to try whatever you saw in the streamed video you were salivating over last night. Why not ask her whether she has a best friend who would like to indulge in a threesome.

Oh, maybe your one of the disingenuous types, who doesn't look at porn, no, no, no. You only consume "erotica". Which is all very tastefully done and is designed for men AND women.

The problem with porn is it takes normal, potentially intelligent men and turns them into idiots

Just remember that attitudes like this have caused billions of deaths over the course of human history.

ROFL! Puh-lease

This posting has a point. It is this. Forget porn. Go out. Meet people - lots of people. Understand yourself. Understand others. Understand the world we live in. And then maybe you'll get laid.

I appreciate the further info ( I was looking for this but did not find it.) However, I find these figures to be rather high.

By 1 A.D., the world may have held about 300 million people. One estimate of the population of the Roman Empire, from Spain to Asia Minor, in 14 A.D. is 45 million. However, other historians set the figure twice as high, suggesting how imprecise population estimates of early historical periods can be.

So where was the other 210-265 million? I find it hard to believe that Asia, Africa and the Americas would have such high populations at that time.

The largest issue in my mind is food. At this time, subsistance farming was the order of the day. For 300 million people to be farming would take a HUGE amount of land, as they did not have the yields that our farms produce today. While I may be off-base, this is what bothers me regarding population figures from that far back. Feel free to correct me.----

and quite a good one too. For reference (and because I love history), it was during exactly this period that the Most Noble Order of the Bath was formed, along with the proverb "cleanliness is next to godliness". The upper classes bathed regularly.

Of course, quite how taking regular showers would have protected the world from a plague spread by rat fleas is a different matter...

How can you conclusively say that porn is degrading to its participants if you yourself are not a participant? Can you demonstrate that (for example) Jenna Jamison doesn't actually enjoy what she does? How can you prove that an afternoon of athletic three-holing doesn't constitute an enjoyable "day at the office" (as it were?)

The statistics regarding mental illness, drug addiction and suicide in the industry have a certain (shall we say) suggestive quality.

Well, there is the issue of all that wasted bandwidth that could have been used for much more useful things, such as downloading and trying different distros/packages...

A far, far more masturbastory experience than mere masturbation. Christ, if that's the alternative for society, bring on the wankers. They have a certain... cleanliness and honesty that intellectual snobs lack.

No, in this industry and any others industry is that it really depends where you are in the food chain.

If you want to have success, you need to control traffic, from the type_in/search engines to the membership site.

without traffic, you can have all the best products, but your not going to make a dime without traffic.

Either you buy traffic or you create it. We deceided to create hundreds of free sites with unique content, so they can be indexed by search engines. Then we link those to biggers links sites that over time surfers bookmarks and we can drive easy traffic to the new sites we make., then we host others sites, and we put out publicity on their site. We push all this into our own membership sites. And it is true, someone who will invest the time and effort will succeed.

And yes, I have the time to read Slashdot at -1 (Because I tend to beleive in first amendement), I love everything that is open and that you can go see inside ( huh, yeah;)) ), to go outside on the beach with a coupple of hot girls. We call that sociolising. Just look at the webservers I am running and on which OS too see where my preference are.

And about morals, the girls we shoot pictures of cost us 5000$ a day for softcore poses because we deal in glamour niche. I don't feel I am exploiting anyone, and I have no trouble sleeping either.

By the way, I just finished Talking to Jenna Jameson, and you can go signup for her own site, she open her partnership progrtam yesterday. http://www.jennacash.com and she pay you 30$ per member you send her.

Anyways, you can attack me or my industry, but we don't put defective tires on defective vehicules, or put chemicals in your cigarettes to give you cancer. Or any of that shit.

Porn is very profitable, I make more money then any of you with it, I get to sleep with the hottest girls, I get to tape them on video and I get to make money out of it. I run my own paysites, my own free sites, my own linksites, my own geocities for adult sites [thunderfree.com]. It's you guys that are funny.

Porn degrading?!?...god i tire of hearing that.
I'd like to ask Jenna or Kobe or Chasey or any of those other porn stars if they feel degraded.
Just because you find someone or something physically attractive does not mean you are ignorant to that person's other qualities
If someone has a great intellect, does that mean its wrong to appreciate their body? Why does everyone _always_ assume that just because someone has a good body, those who admire it do not appreciate any other part of them? Sure, we don't know them, but the same goes for any other stranger you meet. When a 30 year old doctor with a degree in nuclear physics feels insulted when you assume he's horrible in bed, is this not degrading as well? These stereotypes are brought on by YOUR ilk. I give everyone the benefit of the doubt before I meet them, I _HATE_ prejudice. Why can't you ignorant porn bashers do the same?

Hell, I _wish_ I could be a porn star...the salary must be great, and it must be one hell of a fun job.

Well I think you people that think the porn industry is degrading are more ignorant of women than people like I. It never even entered into my mind that porn degrades women. For that to happen, you would actually have to think that porn stars are somehow lesser than you. Aka, YOU are the people degrading women, not I.

So Jenna, if you're reading this and wanna have a nice intellectual conversation, I'd be up for that...if you wanna romp in the sack a bit, I'd be up for that too. Grow up you sexually immature porn bashing twits.

"Jerry Butler in his book "Raw Talent" discussed the inequity of pay for porn actors versus actresses. He claimed that actresses made in the $1000-1500 range as their day rate, which the male actors made about a third of that, $300-500 a day. "

I asked YOU to take one look. I did not say "I know for a fact." I simply asked that you yourself take a look. If you do, I believe you will be shocked and disgusted, and you might even come to conclusions similar to mine. I am not forcing my viewpoints on anyone. I am simply giving a pointer in a certain direction for those who are interested, and letting people draw their own conclusions. If that makes me a moron, so be it, I wear the title with pride. I am not your personal research service. For that, you probably couldn't afford me.

Are you sure you aren't referring to the Salon article which Slashdot linked to, but did not write? Or did you get all bent out of shape over this one sentence? "Ah, a nice respectable trade -- every parent's dream for their business-school dropout child."

You left out the part about putting together a mailing list of the people who asked to be removed (thus verifying that it's a good working address) and your paying customers, and then selling that list (to people looking to sell just about any *other* product or service) as verified and charging a premium price for it.

Did anyone else notice that this guy basically said he was in other facets of internet-based business, and when that slowed down, well, he had an uncle doing it and knew a guy from high school doing it and watched and learned from him for a while, and then opened a school to teach others how, but never seems to have actually had or run his own site of that sort?

Call me a feminist, but the porn industry is so anti-woman it's disgusting. (To be as fair as possible, isn't the entertainment industry anti-woman as well?). I won't go down the "porn is a substitute for a real healthy relationship", but I can say that porn fucks with your head. In small doses, just like everything, it isn't harmful, but porn is addictive. You need freakier shit to get your jollies, you have strange thoughts about porn in the middle of the day, and more importantly you have a terrible misconception of blow-jobs, women, sex, and relationships. Does porn have a place in society? Sure. Does it deserve to be a 26+ billion dollar industry while it is derogatory to women? Probably not.

Is there an explanation for the pay inequity? Supply vs. demand? I've known several women I'd call "exhibitionists" who didn't mind being photographed naked for personal/private purposes. I've known several women who would have any kind of sex (oral, anal, dildo, etc) with pretty much anyone at the drop of a hat.

For most men, getting a woman to have sex off-camera is a bit of a challenge. But fucking a stranger on camera for money? I think it takes a special person to do that. I can imagine that the number of women who would generally be considered physically attractive *and* who will screw for money must be a really small number. Not only is the sex-acting a talent, but the psychological and emotional barriers that have to be crossed are signficant.

This troll is so well fed it's obese! It also happens to be one I agree with.

Far from speaking for the world, you speak for the rational, non-porn-viewing portion of it, which is vanishingly small. If there weren't a lot of loud mouthed bigots out there telling him he couldn't look at pr0n, he wouldn't need our reassurance that it was OK.

> Does it deserve to be a 26+ billion dollar industry while it is derogatory to women? Probably not.

Does a jock with an IQ of 90 deserve to earn millions for throwing a ball? Do the Spice Girls deserve to be paid more than union scale for shaking their tits and squealing about "girl power"? Do the Backstreet Boys deserve to have records go to number one on the charts just because 13 year-old girls like their posters, and can't tell that they can't sing in tune?

Probably not, but it's not my decision.

The long and short of it is, if people want to spend their money on something that's legal, it's none of your business if they do so. Personally, I'd like to see people in general develop much finer taste in many areas, but it ain't gonna happen, and I'm not gonna get an ulcer worrying about it.

It seems like most of the graduates have a very unsteady income. If you include a fraction that make a more consistent paycheck, does that mean the rest have salaries that vary between, say, $100 and $10000 a week?

Reminds me of the guy (urban legend?) who took out a newspaper ad saying "Send me $1, and I'll tell you how to make millions." To every $1 donater, he sent a letter saying "Do what I did: take out a newspaper ad, "

With the HMDs that are coming out now, 3D streaming porn is a very real possibility. After all, you need some way to differentiate yourself from all the other porn peddlers. Something that will get the viewer's attention! Mark my words, 3D porn is the wave of the future!

> The long and short of it is, if people want to
> spend their money on something that's legal,
> it's none of your business if they do so.

That's the attitude that made this country great! If you can slap a price tag on it, it's moral. If people choose to buy slaves, buy land from the government despite any agreements with the natives, or -- for these days -- buy a congressman or a president or a Furby, it's none of yer business. So get yer do-goodin', high-falutin' attitude back to your fairytale land, and pass me some kleenex!

I personally think it's kind of disgusting that porn is the big business it is. Erotica is one thing -- it should be free and not be censored -- but there's something wrong with our society when you can have MPEGs of "HOT YOUNG BARELY LEGAL TEENS" and "HOT BONDAGE AND RAPE PICS!" considered to be a mainstream business. The porn industry does degrade women, and the hot "barely legal" pics promotes the idea of child porn. So while it's legal in the US, that doesn't make it morally right.

So to the guy who complained that slashdotters were knocking the porn industry: while the US Constitution guarantees porn as free speech, it gives the rest of us the right to label you as a pervert.

And if my memory doesn't serve me wrong said Traci has also said some stuff about how Used, Abused, Dirty, and generally Bad she feels when she thinks back. She did it willingly and certainly made plenty of dough, but from that interview it sure sounded like she felt it had destroyed her relationship with both her own body and with sex in general, talking about how she took long showers all time time because over time it just broke her mentally. Things getting progressivly worse through her career as it became harder and harder to shut out the reality of letting a important part of her private sphere be exploited byt herself and others. Or something like that:-/

She's certainly a great testament to how good the porn industry can be for someone don't you think?

I wouldn't mind the porn (and I don't on moral grounds) if it wasn't for the porn industry and what it does to a lot of the people involved. It's not a nice place to be and it eats away at people's lives, minds, and bodies. Not everyone all the time, but too many too much of the time. Yes, drugs play a role, but in parts it's a symptom and not the sole cause. Porn/drug, drugs/porn, in the industry I believe they have a incestual relationship:-/ Why do they do drugs? Could it possibly be that some of them don't feel 100% a OK about living the way they do and need the escape? That they are activly encouraged to (boogie nights reference)? Why do they do more porn then? Well, drugs aren't cheap ya'know.

And for some reason it strikes me as a bad idea that someone (the movie directors/owners/disitributors) actually stand to gain money from their employees being hooked on sunstance abuse. Does that sound like the basis for a healthy industry/relationship?

What will happen though when the pornography industry gets super saturated by thousands of people using this persons plan.

Well, then he'll start offering get rich quick classes to gullible fools in "Offering Get Rich Quick Classes To Gullible Fools About Making Your Fortune From Pr0n". And when that market is saturated then he'll offer classes in offering classes about offering classes.....

I think you get the idea. I'm planning on beating all of this by offering classes in how to rip off idiots left, right and centre on the internet by appealing to their most basic desires like pr0n and getting rich quick. What will these classes consist of? Well, I'll send out a short email to subscribers saying "This is lesson one; pay attention and learn from your experience", then do nothing else. Well, other than spend their money on champagne, bimbos, cars, and a really nice workstation.

This isn't a great time to get into the industry, though. There's still tons of money, of course, but even porn is going through something of a consolidation. There's not a lot of room for "just another small porn site" businesses. Now, if you've got the proverbial better mousetrap, there's always money to be made. Of course, that's true in the mainstream as well.

Heck, I'll let you in on a little secret about porn spammers, while I'm at it. You know what? They don't really make any money. Between having their sites shut down, constantly looking for open relays or bouncing between service providers.... they probably put in twice the energy that legitimate porn sites do, and make about one one-hundredth the revenue. I almost feel sorry for them; they're just gullible people who believe that there's such a thing as "get rich quick." There ain't, in porn or any other business.

1. Get rich investors to give you millions
2. Come up with way to lose lots of money online
3. Give yourself a HUGE salary
4. Lose all investors' money, close up shop blaming market conditions
5. Restart from 1.

I have always thought we should have a pr0n suit.
Make the backend so that it will compile with ncurses or gtk or qt. The interface would be something like if you where to take a MC/Xtree interface and add an image viewer field. Inside that field you should be able to see the full range of jpgs, bmps, png, etc as will as mpgs, avis, movs, rms, etc.

The problem is that I have as of yet to see a console app that could even be hacked to do this. The available image viewers like zgv, fbi, fbview, seejpeg and even jpig (jpeg to ASCII for ASCII pr0n) all take up the whole screen and have no built in menuing capability. There is only one mpeg viewer for the command line and its still in early beta testing.

Hackers consume more porn than anyone does (mostly because we know the nntp will supply unlimited amounts of it for free) and we should have a Pr0n 'O' Matic application that is capable of a lot of cool tricks. Until we can tell Joe Win user that we have the best porn viewing software we will never win the desktop war. Linux has conquored the porn server market and now its time for us to hit the desktop.

Well, there is the issue of all that wasted bandwidth that could have been used for much more useful things, such as downloading and trying different distros/packages...

Seriously, very few people here are for banning porn, or even think that it's necessarily immoral. It's just that we thought the Interent would be used to achieve, well, loftier goals, like the creation of a global society based on the exchange of ideas and knowledge. The fact that it's primary role is that of a giant porn server is a bit of a let-down, so to speak.

I spent last year working for a porn company and this year looking back. You think it's easy? Go read Porncity BBS [porncity.net] for a few weeks and you won't be so excited. Most people who start a pay site get killed by unexpectedly high bandwidth bills( my company paid 250K/month before it took them out) or they find out it's too much work to post to TGPs(thumbnail gallery posts) or to make AVS sites(adult verification sites). A porn site requires a lot of work, a lot of money, or both. Especially if you want to make a living out of it.

I just went through the whole list of comments and I don't see any indictments of the porn industry. I see a number of trolls, a number of jokers, a good number of people pointing out that if the scheme was so brilliant, why isn't this guy getting rich on it, but no posts other than one below yours that even seem to remotly slam the porn industry. Perhaps you should actually read the posts before jumping to conclusions on what they say.

Look, that's the greatest load of twoddle I have ever heard. You have this jaded notion that the porn market exists for people who aren't in the best position to find a sexual partner. Let me clue you in sonny, because you have this ass backwards.

I keep porn. I also have a live-in partner. There's not a damn thing wrong with our sexual relationship, in fact, it's the envy of our friends. We also make no bones about the fact that I keep porn, and she keeps sex toys.

Why?

Because we can't schedule hormones, that's nature's job. We work diferent hours, Often I'm tired or she's tired, and of course, her period... So, this is why this stuff has a place in ANY relationship. Of course there is also the benefit of having this stuff around as an extra kink to add to the mix, but basically it's there as a handy (ROTTEN pun) stand in.

This isn't funny at all, it's pathetic. He tried, and failed, to cash in on the boom of '99 so now he's reverted to what he was good at as a kid: Being a sleaze-bag.

"In seventh grade, I would sell online reports"
Translation: I've been a cheater since way back when.

"I come from a pretty conservative family. I never even thought about any of this."..."my poor mom -- my uncle [started operating a porn] pay site about three years ago. It's huge."
Translation: My family has been lying to themselves for as long as I can remember. I'm so good at lying, I can even convince myself.

"adult people have always been one step ahead of the search engines, the way to spam things, the way to market things."
Translation: The online-sleaze industry has lots of folks experience at exploiting existing technology written by naive geeks.

The saddest thing is, there's every chance this guy won't starve to death.

Withholding is merely a way for the government to be assured of getting their due via compliance through employers.

Withholding serves other purposes as well:

It actually allows the government to collect more money, or (more accurately) to collect the amount due when it is most valuable. Due to inflation, a dollar today will buy more than it will be able to buy come next April 15th, so the government improves its buying power by collecting early.

It allows the government to mask how much of your wealth they are actually taking. Because you never actually have the money that is withheld from your paycheck and because it is taken gradually over the year, you don't get the sticker shock of having to shell over 40% of what you earned last year all at once. I think there was some bill proposed recently that would release employers from the responsibility of withholding taxes specifically so that citizens would be very aware on how much money the government is requiring (as taxpayers would have the money in hand for some time and would therefore experience the loss), but there's no way that's going to pass.

On a different note, yes, if you are self employed you only have to pay taxes once a year (and you don't have withholdings), but in most cases you will probably want to pay "estimated taxes" quarterly in order to avoid a penalty in April (around 9%, I think).

The first question to anyone who is "selling" a get rich scheme is "If it works so well why the hell are you not off doing that?" The only benefit I have ever noticed to the get rich schemes is that it seems more possible to make money selling "how to get rich" schemes than one can make of the actual scheme.

The second question is "How saturated is the market?" In general a market will saturate. Here is a question for slashdot, Do you think the skintrade will ever saturate?

When I read that part of the article I had fond memories of my school days.
Middle school: go downtown to the newspaper stands in front of the court house and put a dollar in and get a fist full of the swingers papers. Sell them for $2 each to suburban peers.
High school: I would sell 2 cartons of cigs a day. GPC/Basic:.10 each or $2 a pack. Name Brand:.25 each or $4 a pack. I didn't start smoking until 3 years after I graduated because a dealer doesn't make money if they sample the merchandise.
Collage: Go to the major Magic the Gathering (Tragic the Addiction) tournaments and by rare cards for cheap and then sell them to suburban peers at "book" rate. Not dishonest or illegal but very profitable.

Now I am all grown up and have a much better moral code. Ah to be young and non-prosecutable and without a conscious again.

They aren't your employers, thus, there is no withholding taxes, as such. Nothing is withheld, since you are working for yourself. You pay your taxes on (or before) April 15 with the rest of us who are self employed. Withholding is merely a way for the government to be assured of getting their due via compliance through employers. That's also why most people get a refund at tax time, because the withholding does not calculate your allowable deductions.

You might be required to calculate your taxes on a quarterly basis, depending on how you set up your financial situation with your state's business laws, and you may choose to set aside a portion of your weekly pay in a separate account for taxes (not a bad idea, and you can give yourself a "refund" at the end of the year after calculating your allowable deductions), but there is no "withholding" as you are used to with a regular weekly/biweekly/semi-monthly/monthly paycheck.

Slashdot is progressive enough in other areas, so why is it that this article seems to be slanted against porn site operators? Why the condescending "Oh, that's a nice field to be working in" attitude? There is nothing wrong with porn. A healthy sex drive is exactly that -- healthy. Oh, sure.. some people abuse pornography, but there are plenty of people who abuse alcohol and tobacco and guns and cars, too. Shouldn't the self-proclaimed moralists go after those things as well?

The type of mindset that is espoused by the anti-porn crusaders is actually a dangerous one. For an example of this idea taken to its logical extreme, look at the Middle Ages. During this time it was considered a "sin" to expose the body -- even to one's self. The result? Bathing and basic hygiene were virtually nonexistant. It was attitudes like this that led to the spread of the Black Plague and other diseases that decimated Europe.

I've got some advice for the anti-porn types. Are you sitting down? Here it is: Don't look at porn! If you hate porn, and those involved in the industry, fine. Hate away. Knock yourself out. But stop trying to run the lives of mature adults who are thinking for themselves. If you want to embark on your anti-porn fight, go ahead. Just remember that attitudes like this have caused billions of deaths over the course of human history. That these attitudes still exist in the year 2001 is a source of endless amazement to me.

Women make a shit-load more in straight porn than men do. Let's ask Asia Carrera (you know who she is [google.com], right?). The following excerpt is from her site [asiacarrera.com], designed and built by Asia herself. She's a member of Mensa, and a true geek (she runs Red Hat, not Debian, but no one's perfect, right?). From right here [asiacarrera.com]

How much do adult film stars make?

This must be the only place in the world where guys get paid less than girls, and we call all the shots. (feminists take note!) Guys get a couple hundred per scene. New girls can get between five and six hundred for a boy/girl scene, and the rate jumps as you become a bigger star. Contract girls get paid by the movie, instead of by the scene, and they make thousands of dollars per movie. Then the stars go on the road dancing, which earns from $2500-$15,000 a week, not including tips, polaroids, etc. It's good money, but remember, when you're still working at 40 or 50, we're out of a job!

Seeing as I run a number of successful porn sites, I thought I might comment on the over-simplifications mentioned here.

Everyone seems to think that running a porn website is the easiest job in the world - I am here to tell you it is *far, far* more complicated than you imagine. Much of this complication stems from the very business itself.

Any nimrod can set up a picture viewer. It's a little more complicated than that, but essentially your average script kiddie can get the physical site up. The problems being when you start trying to *take credit cards*.

There are a number of online credit card processing companies, but very, very few that are really willing to take on "adult sites" due to the rampant CC fraud and chargeback problems.

Most processors will accept up to 10% chargebacks from "normal" sites, like say your Amazon.coms and whatnot. For those that don't know, a "chargeback" is the reversal of a CC charge, instigated by the card holder or the CC company itself. For example, if Joe Sixpack sees a charge on his card, he'll call the CC company and go "I didn't make that!" and the CC company will reverse it. This is a chargeback. The processor is responsible for these costs.

The CC companies, like Visa, will allow a certain amount of this to take place before cutting off the middleman processor. It is the processor's job to maintain this ratio.

However, because of the business of adult content, and the chargeback issues, adult sites are usually only allowed a maximum of 1% chargebacks before being "cut off" by a processor. 1% is not a lot, only 1 in 100. It is very, very easy to get cut off by a processor because of this.

What we do is rotate processors, sending one client to one and another to a different processor, hoping to spread the chargebacks across several processors. Even still, we lose a processor about once every few months.

So, the process of managing processors, and the customer service issues with that, plus filtering out known deadbeats, is a major issue - let alone user management. It is *not* easy.

Next, you have the issue of hacking. Since porn is "dirty", no one feels bad about attempting to steal it. That means we are *constantly* under attack from people attempting to hack in, or who share passwords, or attempt to guess passwords - all kinds of attacks on our system. The system we use to filter out these people is all custom-written C code, apache modules, perl, and firewall configs, and is *not simple*.

Bandwidth is not cheap. Our bandwidth costs for our few sites is on average about $7,500 a month. On top of that, the systems required to pump out those dirty pictures rivals that of the national ISPs I've managed. The layers of servers, cache machines, firewalls, traffic shapers, etc. is *not simple*.

After all that is said and done, the final issue is competition - this is a cut-throat business, with *millions* of sites competing for eyeballs. Making your site stand out in that is a full time job.

When people ask me how to get into online porn, I tell them, "don't. It's too late." They think it's as easy as throwing up a page and waiting for the cash to roll in - it ain't. Trust me.

Ok. I'm going to spill all his secrets. This is how you start and operate your very own fly by night porn site. Take notes, there will be a quiz sometime maybe.

First, you need something to offer on your porn site. Most porn sites involve to some degree pictures of naked women (there are exceptions, I know). There are various ways to accomplish this. You can buy yourself a camera, go up to random women and offer them a wad of cash to take their clothes off, and repeat until you find one that doesn't slap you and run away screaming. This is your porn star.

Take a bunch of pictures of her and now you have content. But wait.. This takes too much work, and besides, it will actually COST YOU MONEY!!! We wouldn't want to actually invest anything in this. The 4 hours you're going to spend setting it up and all that time you're going to spend depositing money in the bank is going to take too much of your time, spending extra money on it just seems like a waste.

Thankfully, there is no need. Just go to Usenet. There is a treasure trove of prescanned pictures available in every variety you would ever need. Of course, most of these pictures are copyrighted, but thats not your problem. You're here to make money in the porn industry, and don't let laws, morals, ethics, or your standing in the community slow you down. Simply stea... err.. aquire as many pictures as you think you will need. Now its time to set up your web page!!!

You can invest in a server at a porn friendly ISP, pay a premium for bandwidth because they know you will have the most popular site they host (except for all the other porn sites). Pay through the nose and watch the orders trickle in...

WAIT!!! What am I saying!! No.. don't bother spending money on that expensive crap. Do what all the other thriving porn sites do. USE GEOCITIES!! Don't mind any disclaimers you see that prohibit exactly your site. This is not your concern. You're here to make money. Don't let guilt of abusing a free service get in the way!

Now you've got a place for your site, and you've uploaded all your pictures. Now you need a flashy front page. Exactly the page that no man with properly functioning anatomy will be able to look away from. This means you need LOTS of BIG WORDS IN CAPS that declare that you are offering not just any regular old porn, but the most nasty wet obscene and most likely illegal porn that has ever existed. And its only available on your site!

Make sure you mention that there are hot teen bitches that want you now, and other phrases that nobody can possibly refuse. All over this front page, you need lots of pictures of exciting beautiful girls (that you walked out on the street and took pictures of) and claim that all of them are naked inside. It doesn't matter if they're not, by the time the suckers find out, YOU WILL ALREADY HAVE THEIR MONEY! Of course, you don't want any children in your nasty porn site, so you better get one of their age verification passwords, or two or three of them just to be on the safe side, since this is a REALLY nasty site. Of course, unknown to the 3 new people that joined the internet this week, age verification systems are just a kickback scheme and do nothing to actually prevent minors, but thats not really your concern. You've done your part.

Now, while your site is the very best there ever was, its possible that you might not appeal to absolutely everyone. For this reason, you should make several front pages, each with a slightly different theme. Just in case some people enjoy men in leather rather than hot teen bitches. No matter. Simply set up a javascript function so when they close the window, it will automatically bring up the next page. I mean, these people intentionally went to your porn site, they're gonna get some porn, no matter what. We'll just keep rotating pages until they find one that they like.

And last but not least, you'll need visitors. The best and least expensive way to do this is sending email to everyone on the internet telling them all about it. People want you to do this. They all want to get into your porn site, I mean... who wouldn't? They've just been unfortunate enough not to hear about it yet, and most of them will be extremely happy you dropped them a short 100k email to tell them about it. A few of these people might send you email back telling you to remove them from your list. Of course, they're just probably doing that because their wife or girlfriend was hovering over them and made them write it. Secretly they want to get into your site, so you might as well send them more email so they'll be able to catch it the second time around. Don't forget to post about your site in every newsgroup on usenet too, and on web page forums, and anywhere else you can find. Just make sure you don't spend any actual money on it. That would cut into your profits, and we wouldn't want that.

Ok. Thats it. You now have a fully functional high volume popular porn site. I don't think I left anything out, but if I did, I'm sure its not important. That'll be $140. Cash please.

Speaking for the world here, nobody wants to stop you from looking at porn, nor even from wanking while you do it.

We're just saying that we're sick and tired of having to also keep on reassuring you that we think you're a swell guy for doing so. In actual fact, we think you're a little bit of a bore (like the guy who spends all his time with his stamp collection), and that you tend to make some fairly silly political arguments. We also think that your industry is not "nice", since it involves the transformation of something which is generally at its best when performed as a mutual, co-operative act into a solitary, commercial transaction. But we usually don't like to say so.

The thing is, if you don't like criticism of pornography (or masturbation thereto), as you say, Don't read it! We have no problem not looking at pornography; we're not obsessed (you're confusing us with you). But you don't seem to be able to exist without constant reassurance that you don't need to be ashamed of anything. And that's becoming a little bit tiresome for us to provide. From now on, you're on your own. Whether you feel ashamed or not of your habit is entirely your own decision, and you can no longer count on us to tell you that porn is A-OK. Sorry and all that, but it's tough love.

Build a content-management system geared towards porography with an e-commerce engine, graphics-rendering system, tracking system, etc. Once the software is in place, charge for the class as this fellow is doing and also have higher-end classes for customization of the backend (Interwoven & Vignette rack in alot of bucks doing this). One could also then hire out consultants for customization which the less tech-savy would need (such as WebCrossings does).

Another route would be to set up an ASP solution by investing in the hardware and "hosting" multiple porn sites under common engines. One could take a cut of the proceeds and also charge monthly fees for hosting & cc-processing.

Pretty sad that these ideas would work where it's a flop under other businesses, eh?