To porn or not to porn?
mattmaroon: I have no moral qualms with it, but I wouldn't because it's just not a good investment. In my travels I've bumped into some people who've succeeded at it (one of whom writes a fascinating blog about the industry) and it's not easy.For one, there's serious capital outlay. Producing porn is not cheap. Good female performers charge $1k-$2k per scene. Males are $300-$500, but significantly less reliable. They're really more important too, since their job is much more demanding. Thanks to lubricants, a female can pretty much phone it in so any hot model will do. But good luck finding a guy who will show up, not be coked out, and be able to get it up and keep it up, and pop when and where you tell him to. You're going to have entire shoots largely wasted due to this.You have to rent locations, camera men, lighting people. You're easily looking at $4k-$5k per scene. To get people to pay money, top sites put out 10 or more scenes per week. Can you fund this until reach the critical mass needed to break even? If so I suspect you wouldn't be considering doing this in the first place.You have to move to L.A. pretty much. That's where all of the adult modeling agencies are, and California is the only state in which shooting a porn does not constitute illegal prostitution.You have to design the web software, which is not trivial. You're delivering videos so your incremental costs are high. You have to deal with payments, which usually means a very expensive third-party provider. The rake is high because of the very high rate of charge backs (which usually occur when the wife sees the charge on the monthly statement and the husband suddenly can't determine what it is and decides its bogus) which in turn makes credit card companies often decline those purchases, so the processors play a game of cat and mouse (much like companies that process payments to casinos, which is how I know this part) by changing their business names and category codes. In fact, you need multiple processors, because each one on its own will fail a large portion of the time. It wouldn't be worth your time to try to process payments yourself.You have to set up and run an affiliate program, which is the main way these sites get traffic. That will require networking with some of the millions of free sites. You have to find a good way of getting content to them, running promotions. The major sites pay up to 70% in affiliate fees.People tend to think that because the industry is unsavory, it therefore is less competitive, but really the opposite is true. Just like selling drugs is way more competitive than selling tires (to my knowledge Goodyear employees don't run drivebys on local Firestone plants) porn is way more competitive than most other industries.