Originally posted by Kinks
I don't think half the votes were serious lol
There's no way to tell. These alt account votes are trying to muddy the water and true motives of this poll which has questionable motives in the first place in a thread with literally nothing in the OP and then abandoned by the OP and left for trolls to take full advantage of.
Originally posted by maddie
hmm
Does that sound like reasonable discussion on a discussion forum in a serious tropical subforum to anyone else? How exactly is this related to "
I've Got 99 Problems... and They're All Bitches
Anything and everything about sex, relations, and gettin yo dick wet. "
now here is some totally related totse spam to put this all in perspective
So I met this girl BiteMeProbation 7 03-14-2002 17:43
I enjoy posing in the nude. ernesto 12 03-14-2002 01:09
Trace is upset syphon detonator 2 03-13-2002 08:00
Need advice Satanic Angel 6 03-13-2002 07:52
Cock enlargement cirux 3 03-13-2002 04:58
SISTER FANTASY? I Love Poop 11 03-12-2002 22:32
Need Help Avoiding Savage Beast of a Girl AcidTrooper 9 03-12-2002 10:19
I enjoy pissing in the nude AcidTrooper 0 03-12-2002 06:29
Inside my girlfriends Vagina.... Paco de Niro 18 03-10-2002 22:26
small problem........ Rogue dude 19 03-10-2002 21:01
Penis length HERE Pages: 1 2 3 4 Spiffy McBang 93 03-10-2002 13:14
Eatin a girl out rydeordie247 14 03-10-2002 04:32
Help Im a Loser!! tenplex 12 03-10-2002 04:26
damn someone tell me what this guy is thinking beerbunny69 12 03-09-2002 20:28
Female Ejaculation MysteriousEnigma 5 03-08-2002 00:43
shit NOT_ME 10 03-07-2002 16:01
HELP IM A LOSER Yuechi 4 03-07-2002 15:19
Women shouldn't be trusted to quickly DyecastRanger 10 03-07-2002 14:12
highheels dub 18 03-07-2002 12:48
Fuck the toys, master the tounge Yuechi 5 03-07-2002 06:29
Sex Toys nsanejane 11 03-07-2002 02:22
HELP! Do I buy her a kitten? Pages: 1 2 RipSlider 29 03-06-2002 23:54
ADD-ON Q TO "CHEATING" Laflyer11 10 03-06-2002 16:34
[howmanytimes] does he satisfy?:: PUnKinpiE 10 03-06-2002 11:23
please help conspiracyoffour 18 03-06-2002 04:57
Sex and Affection
Anything and everything about sex and relations. Please try to keep this forum on-topic, since things tend to wander a bit. House rules are that you must immediately tell us: your favorite sexual position, your favorite sex toy, your sleaziest fantasy, the most outrageous place you've had sex, whether swallowing makes a difference to/for you, what you'd do on a dream date with Chelsea Clinton, the person on CNN you'd most like to... whatever, what you and a lover would do with a fudgecicle, and is fantasizing about "being a tampon" normal for a monarch?
The Naked Truth
Stiff competition. Deadbeat customers. Backend hell. Welcome to the real world of Internet porn. When his dotcom employer folded last summer, the man who calls himself Adam had a fallback plan: amp up his efforts on his voyeur porn site, Publicflash.com, and turn it into a real business. Adam figured he'd have a blast getting […]
Stiff competition. Deadbeat customers. Backend hell. Welcome to the real world of Internet porn.
When his dotcom employer folded last summer, the man who calls himself Adam had a fallback plan: amp up his efforts on his voyeur porn site, Publicflash.com, and turn it into a real business. Adam figured he'd have a blast getting attractive women to do full-frontal flashes outside the local Old Navy, in gas station parking lots, on park benches. Men would line up to pay for the photos, and he'd sit back and count the money.
But as Adam has discovered, running a porn site isn't so easy - or much fun. For starters, the exhibitionism market is crowded with competitors. Then there's the capital outlay required; maintenance and hosting cost hundreds of dollars per month. And there are unforeseen security problems that soak up time and money. "Some users gave out passwords, and they got posted," he says glumly.
Even the part with the nude models turns out to be a drag. "Content acquisition is a pain in the butt," Adam says. "It's constant hand-holding. I have one photographer in New Jersey - I say to set up a shoot, then the model backs out. I send money, harass the guy with email, and get my hundred shots three months later." And don't even ask how Adam's wife feels about it.
Welcome to the real world of Internet porn, a market where the easy money has long since been pocketed - and where even the established players aren't enjoying work the way they once did. In addition to the typical hassles that come with running any operation, this hypercompetitive industry brings its own set of issues: unique legal problems, deadbeat customers, and even the occasional moral qualm.
Which is not to say there's no money in online porn. Although exact figures are hard to come by, this is easily a $1 billion industry, with a complex economy all its own. At the center are a handful of well-established companies, like Cybererotica and Sex.com, generating several million dollars apiece each month. These outfits pay smaller sites for funneling surfers to their higher-quality photos.
If a visitor to, say, College Lesbians or The Gay Gallery connects to a pay site and signs up for content, College Lesbians receives a conversion fee from the larger site. A successful large operation like Cybererotica is really an umbrella company serving many markets with pay sites ranging from Boobtropolis and VoyeurDorm to Hardcrank and Fuck Force 5. Around this core and its affiliates is an ecosystem of ad-supported service sites, such as YNOTmasters.com, a portal for adult webmasters, and Persian Kitty, a hardcore link directory. Breaking in anywhere along this chain is tough.
It's still possible to make a modest income by posting some free pictures and links as part of an affiliate program. "If you have some expertise at getting search engine traffic or using thumbnail galleries," says Ron Levi, one of the principals at Voice Media, owner of Cybererotica, "you can make a couple of hundred bucks per month." But even that's harder than it was. Until last year, most pay sites dished out $50 per conversion. Now $40 is the norm. According to a July 2000 poll taken by YNOT, half of porn sites gross less than $20,000 per year. "The number of adult webmasters who aren't making money is higher than ever," says Oz, president of TheAdultWebmaster.com.
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And taking on the big companies is near impossible. PrimeXTC, the most-hyped entrant of recent years, capped a lavish trade show launch with a private concert by David Lee Roth - then quickly disappeared. "The guys in charge didn't have a clue," says former webmaster Charles Kindall. "They wanted to meet chicks, but they failed to build the business."
Not even a legendary brand can guarantee riches. Playboy.com has lost almost $50 million in the past two years and last October laid off more than a third of its employees. "We underestimated the cost of creating inventory for the Web," says Playboy.com CEO Larry Lux. To keep the site alive, it's diversifying into online gambling in Europe and Asia.
Levi pities anyone dreaming about breaking into porn these days. "When we started in late '95, our conversions were about 1 of 20. Now our average is 1 of 200," he says. "If you started now in this business with $5 million and didn't make a single mistake, I still don't know if you'd make it."
For the aspiring Web pornographer, these are the challenges, business and otherwise.
__Pimping the Product __
People still surf for porn. The Internet represents nothing if not the great democratization of smut - bringing skin to millions of homes, dorm rooms, and offices around the world. According to the Online Computer Library Center, there are about 74,000 adult Web sites. And, except in extreme cases - like war or bioterrorism - sex remains the most-searched word on the Web. So, as in any business, success requires some fairly mundane but critical skills - like the ability to pick a good name, draw traffic, and generate revenue.
The problem is that the site names guaranteed to bring in traffic - sex.com, pussy.com, and just about any twist on fuck, lesbo, and cheerleader - are long since taken. There's not much room for a good branding campaign, so when it comes to marketing, the focus has to be on manipulating the search engines. "Just submitting a site doesn't do much. Even targeting keywords like 'Latin girls' and 'XXX' - if you're down there on the third page, you aren't getting the traffic," says Gary Grigoryan, VP of operations at YNOT. "It's a science, knowing how different search engines qualify sites by different measures."
There are a few tricks, of course. "People create circles of sites so that they all link to one another, to boost link popularity," says Grigoryan. And then there's the endless barrage of auto-opening pages that every porn surfer has encountered.
But even mastering search engines does not necessarily bring on paying customers. A site that's optimized for a search engine may not be good at closing sales, so the webmaster has to watch for spiders and reshuffle for customers.
__Taking It to the Bank __
More and more, financial institutions are shunning the smut merchants. Banks that are generally eager to set up credit card processing accounts for Web retailers are saying no to online porn. And that has spelled trouble for Natacha Merritt.
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__Half of all adult sites gross less than $20,000 a year. Breaking in anywhere in the chain is tough. Going big is almost impossible. __
Despite the success of Digital Diaries, her book of sexually charged, nude self-portraits, the 24-year-old author has found it nearly impossible to run a porn business. She can't get an account with a name-brand bank. "I tried Chase, Citibank - they wouldn't take me," she says. "It's a pain in the ass. You go to a third-party billing service, but these guys are crooks; they take 25 percent. Plus your members will hate you because the billing makes you go to another site. It's a headache."
But you can hardly blame the banks. Porn sites can be more trouble than they're worth. In the spring of 2000, American Express quit dealing with the porn business altogether because of the high number of chargebacks, or reversal of payments - 15 to 50 percent of the transactions.
The biggest problem comes from the many porn surfers who buy memberships but say they didn't - a difficult claim to disprove. If hit with enough of these, a company could get fined by its credit card partner or even have its account closed. "Consumer abuse is a problem," says Cybererotica's Levi. "We don't have a leg to stand on, because we don't have a signature from them. I've paid a webmaster 40 bucks to sign them up, and I'm out that amount."
It's not always the customer's fault, though. Sleazy site owners have been known to sign users up for "free trial memberships" and then charge them anyway. Voice Media signed a consent decree with the FTC last year after being charged with such tricks. And porn is also popular with credit card thieves. So much so that many sites choose enhancementing software that allows only the safest-looking transactions to go through - which inevitably winds up turning away legitimate business.
__Staying Out of Jail __
There are a lot of ways a porn operator might run afoul of the law. Post a picture of an underage model or of an unsuspecting subject caught using the toilet, and you could end up in court. Ditto if you're caught with copyrighted pics that aren't yours. Then there's the prospect of obscenity prosecution, which some people fear could increase with a Republican administration.
For one example of lawyer bait, take a porn purveyor who calls himself D-Man. "Celebrities sell better," says the 24-year-old owner of a site specializing in photos of naked actresses and other celebs, from the flavors-of-the-month (Penelope Cruz) to the unexpected (Pearl Bailey). Speaking from his parents' home, where he lived until recently, D-Man says he gets his content from newsgroups. A quick tour of the magazine photos in his archive, though, reveals that in fact he relies on other people's property. Not long ago, he received an angry cease-and-desist email from Alyssa Milano and is named in a pending lawsuit. But he still thinks he's in compliance with all copyright laws - because he doesn't post pictures containing copyright notices.
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A thicket of legal issues confronts noncelebrity sites as well. The biggest danger comes from the Child Online Protection Act, which was passed in 1999 but has been in appeals courts ever since. COPA was designed to shield children from porn, but merchants are worried that conservative prosecutors could use COPA to put an end to online porn altogether. As a result, the owner of Voyeurweb, known as Igor Shoemaker, says he's prepared to shutter his US operations on a week's notice.
But that may not be enough. Given the Internet's reach, porn sites find themselves breaking obscenity laws around the globe. "There is no way to say what I do is legal all over the world," Shoemaker says. "Some countries have no law at all. But I would go to prison for what I do in Germany - they don't even accept our type of age validation. They want a notarized copy of your driver's license."
Shoemaker's solution: He's incorporated the company in Panama and other loosely governed nations. "Voyeurweb is owned by corporations around the world," he says, "and they are liable for it."
__Seducing Partners __
Brooks Talley, the founder of Bondage.com, has turned his predilection into a business with more than 200,000 registered users. "You can't be good at something unless you enjoy it," says the 32-year-old former tech analyst and columnist for InfoWorld. Most Bondage.com visitors come for the free stories, live chat, and matchmaking service, but enough of them bite on the upsell to paid content, which makes Bondage.com a thriving small company, with six employees and a medical plan. "We are profitable," says Talley, "but I'm not getting rich."
And not likely to, either. Targeting a niche is a good way to make a living - the more narrowly you define your kink, the more passionate the audience. It's also a good way to stay out of the crosshairs of the major players. But going small also means it's hard to attract advertisers - especially now. "We thought we'd be selling more ads," says Talley, "but it's just the wrong time."
Part of the problem, of course, is that few advertisers outside of the porn world want to be associated with the industry. Even companies that supply the business often pretend they don't. For example, until recently, Akamai resold its high-speed Web services to porn sites through another company, Directrix. (Akamai changed its policy in July when Directrix stopped paying its bills.)
And Talley says that a maturing porn market is only making it harder to keep his customers. Once upon a time, users were excited just to find a site catering to their tastes. Now, keeping those users around means continually adding features - discussion groups, instant message capability, personal ads, et cetera. The day he stops improving is the day his customers go to a competitor.
"This has become more like any commodity business - lots of people with similar products," says Talley. "The number of sites has shot up; our conversion rate has stayed flat, but we're putting 10 times as much work into keeping it there."
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__The Shame of It All __
The porn business has been good to Igor Shoemaker. Four years ago, after retiring from the software industry, he spent his days surfing for hidden-cam shots of women in dressing rooms and for zoom-lensed glimpses into the neighbors' bedrooms. Finding almost none of that, he started Voyeurweb to fill what he figured was an underserved segment of the market.
