Maybe because there’s no sheep involved? 
Not a question, but a comment… sorry if it’s misplaced.
I am generally opposed to the porn industry. I believe it’s wrong, and can border on evil.
However, pretty much all the objections I have to it are obliterated by the business practices Abby Winters describes above. In short, then: were all skin-pics and skin-flicks produced under the guidelines described above, with the same attention to the welfare of the models, I would have absolutely no complaints about the industry.
I’ll go along with you Bricker insofar as the comments about the way Abby handles the business as opposed to the unscrupulous bastards that take advantage of girls who need some extra cash.
I don’t thing the porn business is wrong or evil at all. It is, if run the way Abby runs it, just a business like any other.
OK the product itself is unique I suppose but despite all that it is a product, and a very viable one at that
In what way?
Also, can you provide any information on what a typical interview would be like?
How do industries deal with std’s
I’ve got to know. What do they want? I think I’d be mortified to ask for customer service assistance on a porn site because it’s a) porn and b) I’d feel like a moron. If something went wrong I’d probably just cancel the credit card then go drown myself.
That one piqued my curiosity too.
How do you deal with different laws as you send content internationally? Do you blur out the ‘naughty bits’ if you send to Japan? What about age of consent? Don’t ya’ll have a lower one there than we do here in the US? Do you spend time researching different internet laws to make sure you know what kinds of hassles you might have?
I can’t answer for Abby, but I know a bit about internet law: the answer is, provided the site is legal in its own jurisdiction, then it is not responsible for illegalities overseas. It is up to the consumer not to view content illegal in their jurisdiction, or in some less-than-democratic countries, the state sometimes blocks any material it views objectionable.
As a completely hypothetical 
question. If I person were to subscribe to your site, what would show up on the credit card bill?
Right, I knew that…but what I was wondering was if Abby takes some of those laws into account as she develops content for her site. For example the AOC in Australia is 16, so I’m assuming she could have 16 year old models. However as she stated that a large portion of her business is from the US, does she only then use models that are above the AOC for the US?
Same with Japan…does she offer content that is legal in Japan, so that she can get subscribers there that don’t want to get into trouble legally?
I can answer that one! All that appears is the name of the billing company, GMBill. They are well aware that most people don’t want something like “XXX HARDCORE IMMORAL PORN XXX” appearing on their bill.
since you are paying so much above average, are your models making a living of modelling for you? Do they also model for other sites? Is this just a side job? I know it will vary from girl to girl, but what is the general trend?
What percentage of the models have obvious drug problems and/or psychological issues?
What kind of porn do YOU like? (sort of goes along with someone else’s question…) Do you still enjoy porn? Do you make a rule for yourself not to get too “attached” to any of your models’ images?
How do you deal with people giving away your movies online and giving away passwords to your site? Do you actively work to stop this or view it as an underground form of advertising?
She already mentioned that they don’t hire any who do. The inobvious or those developed after hiring are another problem.
We do to an extent, and I’d like to do more. Most of our R&D is back office stuff, tho. For example…
Shooting four hours of Hi Def video (with a bit rate of one gigabyte per minute!) to hard disk drives and getting it into an Avid edit suite. Salesmen love to tell you it’s all go, but in the real world, there’s a lot of issues to work out.
We’re doing some moderately cutting edge stuff with load balancing the site across 14 servers (also helping us with redundancy).
We’re doing some very cool stuff behind the scenes with AJAX and PHP.
We have some unique probelms with the massive amounts of media we need to store, backup, transport, index, and manage (We’re buying a few 8Tb servers a month lately). The more IT stuff you get, the better infrastructure you need - cisco switches, fibre to clients from servers). We’re using microwave to link several sites together, and we’re about to run fibre to another site.
We have tried to work this out before, but it’s very hard to. I’d think it’d be one in 500 or so, roughly.
I certainly have transformed into a business person. Over the last two years the company has grown and grown, and I find myself spending a lot more time on administritve stuff than creative stuff. It bothers me a lot, and I am working on fixing it (without much success).