The face of Internet porn: adult webmaster school's Philip Brandes

About four years ago the much-hyped mavens of the internet revolution were busy making all sorts of promises of how the medium would change the world. Internet users, they mused, would soon be able to do just about everything from their desktops, from paying bills to buying a car to ordering pizza. Investors were thrilled and dumped money on these ventures, most of which soon flopped. The rest is a dot com cliché of failed dreams and overeducated, unemployed geeks clamouring for the handful of remaining computer jobs.

This particular cliché has an underside that is fast becoming a stereotype on its own. While the "legitimate" internet economy has seemingly bit the dust, its sleazy cousin is rolling along quite nicely, thank you.

You need look no further than your average email account. More often than not, it is crammed with adverts promising young girls, horny housewives, Asian beauties and black babes. Unlike internet pizza, it seems, there is always a demand for sex.

Enter Philip Brandes. A longtime dot-commer, he got into the internet porn business after losing his job for the umpteenth time. In doing so, he tapped into one of the most reliable markets on the internet: the millions of Joe Shmos who have turned to their computers rather than suffer the indignity of picking up the latest copy of Playboy or Hustler (or worse) at the corner store.

He made oodles of cash - in true porn king fashion, his first big purchase was a Lincoln Navigator - and the 26-year-old former Montrealer started teaching others how to do it last June. It is so easy, he says, that his company, Adult Webmaster School, trademarked the phrase "Get paid to look at porn!"

"The site does reek of those infomercial, self-help type things," a cheery Brandes said from Las Vegas. "But I'm not a Tony Robbins type. Most people aren't going to make money [from those schemes]. All my students make money."

For $140 in tuition, the former Lower Canada College student and Westmount resident will teach students the intricacies of making money on internet sex. Students won't learn how to set up a porn site and reap money from credit card sales. Rather, they become what Brandes calls "promoters" for larger pay sites.

Here's how it works: students buy internet smut from various content providers on the web. Some take their own pictures or make their own videos. This content is then put on a web page as a thumbnail gallery, which is flush with advertisements for "real" (read: membership) sites. Those sites, and there are millions, pay the students for the business they drum up. In internet jargon, it is called directing traffic. The membership sites give a cut of their fee to the students.

Sound easy? Brandes is the first to admit as much. But in the shady, shifty world of internet porn, pratfalls abound. Many sites fudge their numbers or simply refuse to pay out. That's where the Adult Webmaster School comes in. Brandes's program, a correspondence course over the net, teaches where to find the most reliable adult sites and the cheapest content providers. The course is constantly evolving, he says, and students get the most up-to-date information.

"We're like the Wall Street Journal of internet porn," Brandes managed without laughing. "Sure you can get most of what we teach for free, but is it reliable? We have good info, and people will pay more for the subscription."

Though the AWS is pumping out hundreds of "graduates" - there are 700 students at the moment, according to Brandes - he doesn't think the market will ever be saturated, because there are endless perversions to exploit out there.

"You might have to promote something you don't like," he said. "We don't tolerate bestiality, rape or violence, but there are niches that are perfectly fine, like pregnant, or midgets, or pregnant midgets."

Surely, though, he must feel a tad dirty about peddling this crap to the world at large?

"I feel less sleazy than the offline people, like pornstars and the Larry Flints of the world. The people in the [internet porn] industry are basically computer geeks," Brandes said. "In some cases it's exploitive, yeah, but these girls get paid really good money."

So, it seems, do his students. Though reluctant to give out the names - not surprisingly, the porn webmaster is a media-shy creature - Brandes says some of his charges are making nearly $2,000 a week. The demand rarely fluctuates: people will always pay money to see sex, regardless of economic conditions.

"Porn is a necessity, like food or shelter," Brandes said. "People need a little fun, and that need doesn't go away."

For more info visit Brandes's site at http://www.adultwebmasterschool.com/