Does anyone have any experiences with starting a pornsite? Good or bad . . . Cost/Income . . turnkey sites . . ??
Thanks
I wouldn’t recommend it, there are just too many and yours would be just another in the crowd. If you plan on making money be prepared to spend thousands of dollars on ads.
And then there’s content. Just how many hot teen sluts are there that haven’t been photographed?
That people pay for porn on the internet has always amazed me. It’s like paying for a prostitute at a nymphomaniac’s convention.
I understand people use their credit cards to pay for short-term access download your site and then cancel their CC payment.
This is a mature market and I suspect the economies of scale favor the established players.
Probably a good idea ten years ago.
You might see if Stoid shows up. As I recall, she owns/runs an adult site, although different from the norm.
I am guessing costs boil down to 3 factors:
- Bandwidth, bandwidth, and bandwidth. I’ve been told that nothing sucks bandwidth away quicker than porn, except for pirated software sites. Read most web hosting contract terms of service, and they’ll specifically prohibit porn sites, probably in whole or in part for this reason.
- Content… you’ll have to pay content producers for pictures to post. I don’t know how much that’ll run you, but I’m betting that the initial outlay contraindicates shoestring budgeting.
- Staff costs… you’ll need people capable of laying out a site properly, and setting up an online billing/purchasing system to extract money from customers for this. Someone with these skills probably warrants somewhere between $30K and $80K annually.
Be warned, people steal credit card numbers, then register on these sites. When the legit card owner complains about the bill, Visa/Amex/whoever will reverse the charges, and you’ll be out the bandwidth you spent servicing this client. Some Visa/etc processors charge you a free every time there is a reverse of charges.
Be warned, if your site is improperly secured, you WILL get hacked and passwords WILL either be stolen or generated anew. These will be shared on illegal websites, and your bandwidth will get sucked dry until you plug the security hole and kill the bogus accounts. After this, you’ll likely see a hefty hosting bill come in your email. Googling “porn” + “passwords” would likely turn up intances of this. I’d check but I’m at work on break…
Overall, Paul in Saudi is probably right. Unless you have funds to lose money for half a decade before making a profit, or already knew more about the business than you appear to on the face of your question, stay away.
If you really want to get into this industry though, I’d suggest working for an established player first for at least 3-5 years before going independent.
Live porn??? There are established ones, like ifriends. You need a webcam and pc, I think they take a percentage, I heard 40% from a girl who does it. I think it can be pretty lucrative.
This topic comes up now & then for some reason…at any rate, to start, you’d need to search the web for adult web site law, there are a few sites discussing it.
Paul in Saudi is absolutely correct. I started a porn site about 2.5 years ago, and now it’s doing ok, but there is a lot of competition. I have lost several peers who had excellent content and management skills.
I guess like any biz, there is a lot of luck involved. If you want to star a site now, you really are pushing shit up hill, unless you have aniche you can fill, and fill it well. Every niche already has players now, so the vibe is, you need to pick a niche you can do better than your competition in.
As someone suggested, “teens” is not a good place to start. Hetro sex has been done to death.
If you’re looking for a biz investment, a porn site is not the way to go these days. You’d turn more profit from a fleet of hot potato carts, and for a lot less hassle. There are hundreds of sites out there run as business propositions, and I’d say about 90% of them are lame - customers show no loyalty (and loyalty to your brand is where the money is - people who come back for more, monthly / yearly).
If you have a passion for a specific niche (as I did), you’ll have a lot more potential to go far. I’d be pleased to discuss your ideas with you, if you have the passion (not really interested if you’re strictly biz).
My passion for my niche I think is one of the main reasons my site is still around - I employ five people full time, and have studios in two cities, here in Australia. The biz has grown faster and better than my wildest dreams a few years ago.
Remember, passion sells. 
abby
My wife had a site for a while a few years ago. It started as something fun to do because we have a friend who has been running one for about 12 years or so in Canada through her own server and set her up, only charging for bandwidth. The market was pretty tough even then, but eventually, she started making what she called “bill money”, maybe a few hundred or so a month. Our canuck friend was making in the thousands a month, but she had a good portion of the market after being up and running for so long and getting so big and branching out, etc. Her friend’s server died couple of years ago right after we moved, and when she got a new one up and running she had decided to run primary webcam stuff and couldn’t offer the space. At that point though, my wife was fairly burnt out on it as she ran her site differently than most were at the time, which was very interactive and personal. She answered all emails personally instead of a canned auto-reply, all the pics posted were of her instead of different girls from who knows where, updated with stories and stuff, did a chat room thing one night a week, posted between 50 and 100 new pics every week, did custom videos (at high cost) and took requests for site pics, all for 1/2 the cost of most other sites that didn’t do much. She also didn’t have hundreds of links, only a few to the sites that she liked, usually girls that she knew, and no popups at all. Each week, updating and maintaining the site, chatroom and emails took between 30 and 60 hours depending on the traffic. But it paid off as she had a lot of fun, had a very loyal following that grew weekly, made a lot of good friends and even today, she still hears from some of them.
She has toyed with the idea of putting it up again, but nowdays, as mentioned, the market is thoroughly flooded, and finding a reputable server that isn’t going to rob you blind under the table is tough. Also, most servers that will run an adult site charge by hardrive space, the most standard rate being about $10 per Mb. Her site, when it stopped, was over 50Mb. You do the math on a monthly out of pocket that doesn’t even include bandwidth and a very high risk of ever recovering that. It’s a catch 22. You have to start small to be able to afford it, but you don’t attract attention unless you are big. You don’t get big without customers, but especially today, you can’t get customers with just a few pics. There are just so many sites now that you can find more free porn surfing around than you could find a few years ago with memberships in good sites. If I’m going to pay you 10 bucks a month, what are you going to give me that I can’t get from Playboy or from free introductory sites? My wife had a small free site as a “teaser” and that got 100 times more hits each week than the member’s site. Those 6 free pics a week were good enough for most people.
Another problem is that the laws are constantly changing, and trying to keep up with them to make sure that you aren’t going to “be the one they make an example out of” can be a real pain. You don’t mention if you are male of female. If you are female, I can only say what the others have: Good luck if you go for it, but don’t make plans on buying a new Jag anytime soon, keep some extra cash around to pay for the site, and be prepared for a hell of a lot of work. If you are a guy, don’t bother. Most guys who will buy a membership to a site can sniff out a male run website in a minute, and that’s not what they want.
We have a pre-made website, with over 5000 pics, video clips, etc, and we don’t see that there is a profitable way to start it up again. Use that information as you will. In short, it’s not a business that you can break into these days, unless you have a cheap way to post and run it from day one, but you are still competing with people who have been doing this for years and have 10 times the product to offer. If you want to do a site for fun, go for it. That’s why we did it and it was a lot of fun for the most part. If you are looking to make some dough, I’m with Abby, buy a hot dog cart. If you aren’t having fun, it’ll show in the pics, which is bad.
Abby… how YOU doin???
Well, I built a web site for a well known porn star(#1). (Great work if you can get it
Anyway, she had a loyal following so getting members wasn’t much of a challenge. For developing the site I got a flat hourly rate of $40 per hour. (Note, I built the whole thing from the ground up except for the billing system. The billing people charged for their services but I don’t know what they charged. I just dealt with the technical aspects) When building the site I did all the coding and scanning of images. For updating the site I got $25 an hour. I also managed to get %2 of the net from the site while I was running it.
As Jonathan Woodall pointed out the bandwidth is a major issue as is harddrive space. I don’t remember the prices the hosting service charged but it was a fixed amount for X amount of bandwidth per month and X amount of drive space. If you exceded the bandwidth or drive space limits they charged more. Do a google search on hosting services and you can get an idea of what those costs will be. Note, a whole lot of hosting services WILL NOT host porn sites.
At this point I would think that unless you, or whomever is going to be on your website, are an established porn star you aren’t going to make any money off it.
Slee
#1. I got this gig through pure luck. I met a guy at a bar who was the Porn Stars brother. Anyway, after we made a deal on my building the site the star of the site took me to CES in Vegas which has a large adult section. I got in free and walked around with a very well known porn star. She was stopped about every 10 feet by someone looking to take a picture with her. She also introduced me to a whole lot of other porn stars she knew. For a computer geek that was a really cool experence.
And this analogy works how?
Are you saying that there is free internet porn out there waiting to jump all over me and satify my every need without me having to spend a dime?
I’ve seen the free trial-size porn that’s out there on the internet. And I’ve seen the full-fledge “member’s only” (pun unavoidable) porn. There is a difference. Grainy, 30-sec MPEGs wouldn’t cut it for me if I chose to purse a life of self-satisfaction via internet porn.
I would definately pay for the good-looking prostitute if the attendees at the convention were a bunch of unattractive, pimply-faced, buck-toothed teen sluts.
Exactly. This analogy is perfect (and funny!) :)). No members site is going to give away much quality material for free (tho crappy sites do often). So I guess it comes down to what your needs are.
Some people are sated by, er, “unattractive, pimply-faced, buck-toothed teen sluts”, others prefer a bit more quality. And many people are not aware of the possible quality available in porn these days, because the make the same mistake milquetoast makes.
abby
Hiya
I am amazed by this talk of problems with hosting and HDD space. Maybe I have just been lucky, but I have never had a problem with these issues. But then I have treated it as a business, and don’t expect my dialup ISP to host my site.
My site delivers between 50 and 80Gb a day, at the moment. I pay $1US per Gb delivered, so that’s about $2000/month in bandwidth. I pay $150 a month to my host, for leasing a P4 1g machine, with 1gb ram, and a bunch of HDD’s. They made my machine to my spec - they can build you whatever you like.
We have about 8Gb of content online, and if every member downloaded everything, we’d be in trouble, but luckily you can rely on the fact that most people are too busy to get much more than the stuff they really want, which suits me fine. There are always going to be people who download every single bit off a site (HTML pages, zips of images AND the actual images, AVI and MPG versions of the same videos, and so on) mainly because they are dumb, but again, that’s a cost of doing business.
Sure, some hosts do not host porn, but there are many that don’t mind, so long as you pay your bill on time (well, so long as you do nothing illegal!), and those that specialise in hosting porn sites. I go with a host that is 100% business - porn hosts tend to think they know what is best for you (or rather, what they know to be best for many porn sites, which is certainly not what is best for me, thanks very much).
My host happens to be very good (24*7 phone or email support, emails are addressed in a matter of minutes), but I pay for that in bandwidth - they are not very cheap. There are hosts out there that charge around 50 cents per Gb delivered, but I shudder to think what their service is like.
Service matters, absolutely. If my site is down for a minute I get a dozen emails, and if it’s longer than two minutes, people start cancelling. I think that’s pretty immature, but they have a point - there are sites out there that have - literally - 100% uptime. We come pretty close, 99.97% or so, which is good enough for me! Loosing customers because of a HDD fail or something is just the cost of doing business.
I pay the guy who did a lot for the database programming on my site $75 an hour for sysadmin work. He’s on call 24*7 as well, but if he does his job right, he never get’s woken in the middle of the night, and he does his job right. We have minor glitches, but nothing serious. I have a machine set up to send me an SMS message on my mobile phone should any of several serious things happen, and ironically, the messages I have got have been false alarms so far.
If you are starting a serious site, you will need a sys admin (a geek who knows linux and apache inside out), and they are not cheap. I do not regret one cent I have spent on sys admin.
Legal issues? Meh. So long as you steer clear of the obviously bad and illegal niches, US law goes easy on you (a lot easier than Australian law, one of the reasons I host my site in the US!). I see a lawyer once a year, and we talk more about the contracts I have with models, and stuff, than content laws. Again, I am careful and sensible. Moral issues aside, there might be a lot of money in running a kiddie porn site - but it’s a crazy thing to run a legitimate business in. FTR, I abhor kiddie porn.
I am a photographer, so we find and shoot all models (between three and five a week) ourselves. That’s a big commitment in time, skills, and hassle, so plenty of sites buy material from other people. This may be bought under an exclusive contract, where the seller is not allowed to sell that content to anyone else (expect to pay between $1 and $4US per image), or non-exclusive, where the same stuff will be sold to may other sites (ie, your competition!) (expect to pay between 20 cents and $2 per picture). Controlling factors are the quality of the work, the subject matter, and the rep of the shooter.
The biggest problems you will face, as a webmaster for a porn site, is finding new customers. We all know there are a lot of people out there looking for porn, so that’s a good start. There are many ways to find new customers, and the most expensive way is usually the best. The cheapest way is the most offensive, and thus, not ideal.
The most common these days is to get yourself a bunch of affiliates, who take a stack of your content, save it down to ultra low quality, and list it on websites that promote “free pictures”. (They make it low quality because they know there will be thousands of people downloading those pics, and that costs money - better quality pics means more money down the drain).
The rub comes when once those punters have looked at the crappy pics, their appetite it whetted, and want some more… they click on the link on this page of crappy pics to go to the real site. If they like what they see and join the site, the person who set up the page with crappy pics (your affiliate) gets 50% of the join fee.
People visiting your site are called “guests” (or just “traffic”). They take your “tour” where you show off you site, and give away some stuff for free, and if they like what they see they buy, or “convert”. Conversion of traffic into paying memberships is very complex, and the whole point of the biz.
This means that your tour - especially the very first page - is of huge importance. Most sites will loose about 80% of traffic on the first page - people went there by mistake, they don’t see anything that appeals to them immediately, whatever.
As a webmaster, you can buy “traffic” - those popups you often see are spots bought by webmasters, to a page devoted to their site. They pay a small amount of money (around $75US for 100,000 “uniques” (a real person, in theory, is called a “unique” hit, and is very valuable - you want lots of these). They count on one person in 100 or so looking at the popup before they close it (or reset their computer!), and about one person out of 200 of THOSE will end up buying a subscription to a site. Did you make your money back on that $75 you spent on traffic? Maybe…
The traffic can be “forced” - all 100,000 clicks in one hour, or a trickle of a few thousand a day. Your hosting sitch may dictate how much traffic you can handle at once.
The conversion, expressed as a ratio, like 1:200 (200 people look at your site, one of them joins). The type of traffic dictates a likely conversion ratio. Exit traffic is pretty crappy (1:500), but it’s cheap. This kind of traffic is not at all targeted, as most surfers are well aware. Slightly better is named traffic - people see words like “amateur sluts” or “busty babes”, and click on the link. If you run a website that features “amateur sluts”, you might buy 50,000 clicks to that link, for about $75.
Affiliates can do this traffic management for you, as well - they spend the $75, and get 50% of each signup they send you. You’d watch your statistics closely, to see what kinds of traffic convert best (if you bought the traffic yourself), or just watch the money roll in (in theory), if affiliates did it on your behalf.
Alledgely, plenty of sites run on this method - 10 affiliates sending two or three signups a day, and you have a decent site… if you can bare giving away half of your gross to some dude with few skills and not much overhead (compared to running your site).
Me, I am not down with that at all. The nett result is that I have less customers than I could, but when I do get a customer, I get all the money (well, most - the billing company takes a fair whack!) - so it probably ends up equal in the end. We rely on websites that review porn sites (my site reviews well, for several reasons), word of mouth, and patience.
Traffic from a good review site converts pretty well - about 1:60 (out of 60 people who read that review and look at your site, one of them will join), and in fact, is generally the best type of traffic out there, but only if your site reviews well. A site that reviews well, will have frequent updates, high technical quality, simple nav, fast downloads, no popups, easy help, and so on - basically, the kinda site you yourself would like to subscribe to. It’s amazing how few webmasters understand this basic rule.
You can also make friends with your peers, and do a little cross promotion - “if you like what I do, check out what Abby does on her site”. I do the same thing, and we send each other customers. Again, this converts well, 1:60 or so, if you choose your peers carefully.
We just released a line of DVD and VHS tapes for sale, sold thru a specific niche provider, and we got a huge increase in memberships. The DVD reviewed well, sold many copies, and exposed the website to people who did not even know it existed. Of course, our DVD was excellent for the genre, and that helped.
Cross media marketing, of course, is advertising 101, but WTF do I know about advertising? I am a photographer! (it was luck that we did this, I had no idea how good it could be for biz). We plan to release more DVD’s in the future, but I expect the initial influx we saw will not be repeated, law of diminishing returns and all that. We’ll need to find a new media.
Once you have the members, you need to keep them, so they want to hang around and be rebilled each month - this is called “retention”. The only way you are gonna do that is with regular (four times a week, as a minimum, these days) updates of new stuff (pics, video, whatever). An industry average for a good site might be three month retention. That means, a customer joins for say, $15, and is rebilled twice for $15 - you made $45 from that customer.
Retention and conversion all come down to how good your content is. If you have shit content, you’ll get low conversions and bad retention. If you have the same content that everyone else has (or very similar in style), again, your conversion and retention will suck.
So the key, like I said above, is to fill a niche that is either not filled at all (unlikely!), or work on a niche that is not well catered to currently. Many other people realise this, and are making moves as we speak. usually, it’s bigger companies, like arms of Hustler, who have lots of money for venture capital, and think “well, hey, I heard that some people have a fetish for balloons! We got the money, the models, the know how to start site, lets get a team of photographers to create content for our balloon fetish website!”
They do just that, and no one subs, because while the shooters are well aware of how to use a camera, they have no fucking idea why balloon fetishists like to see people play with balloons, and miss the whole point of it. This has happened to every fetish out there, time and again.
The converse is also true - Barry the balloon fetishist gets his girlf to pose for some pics taken in his lounge room. She’s kinda fat, and not very pretty, but she shares Barry’s fetish, and they make some stuff that other fetishists love. But Barry has no money, no photographic skills, no web skills, no management skills. So, his site is crap, makes no money, and he gives up.
So perhaps a good idea is to find a struggling fetishist who has similar ideals to you, and partner up with him? I was lucky in that I had the desire to learn the skills (I had none when I started), and I had a very firm idea of what niche I wanted to fill.
The money? Well, it’s ok… like I said, I employ five people full time, and shoot a lot of naked people each week… but I drive a Subaru wagon, and I’m saving for a deposit on a nice but not amazing house suburban Sydney. I take a modest wage, and own a company that I might be able to sell for $1 mil (doubt I’d have the heart to, and I dunno if I could sell it for that really). I work 12 to 18 hours a day, six or seven days a week, and don’t have time for a social life (apart from the SDMB!), or even an SO.
If you’re looking to make a quick (or even a slow) buck, I think it’s unlikely you’ll make it in internet porn (tho, some websites with original ideas have gone amazingly well - better than trad porn like Hustler and Penthouse).
I hate to sound corny, but I honestly believe if you have passion for your ideas, you have a fair chance, and I say, go for it. How can I help?
abby
thanks everyone for your thoughts and input. it gives me more to think about.
I dont think I will try this; but if I do, I most certainly will get in touch with you abby.
thanks again!
Abby,
I’m curious at what mistake you are referring to that I made.
For starters, I’m not trying to be defensive. And I’m not trying to be be argumentative with you. My questions is sincere, not snotty.
In my opinion, the mistake I made was using the phrase “and this analogy works how?” when I really should have used the phrase “and this analogy supports your statement how?” (With the original statement being “That people pay for porn on the internet has always amazed me.”)
Clearly, I understand how the analogy works, I extended it. I was trying to make the point that quality is important. And I would rather pay for quality (be it internet porn or a prostitute) than settle on low quality simply because it’s free.
So aside form the admitted mistake of using poor wording in my original question, it seems to me that you and I agree on the issue. What did you think I meant?
Thanks for your response,
–toast
In addition, Abby, I want to add that I did not not take your original comment as an attack on me. I simply saw it as a statement on your part. It just lead to a sincere question on my part.
Thanks for understanding!
Abby,
Do you find a lot of people pirating the images from your site? Is piracy something that hurts the internet porn industry or is it not a problem?
-
-
- I have never known anyone involved in internet porn, but I recall reading several years back that over 85% of the profitable businesses on the net were pay porn sites. So as difficult as someone who’s been there will say it is, making money at it is probably a lot more likely than with anything else.
~
- I have never known anyone involved in internet porn, but I recall reading several years back that over 85% of the profitable businesses on the net were pay porn sites. So as difficult as someone who’s been there will say it is, making money at it is probably a lot more likely than with anything else.
-