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So you want to be an online pornographer? | 1, 2, 3


Did you ever think you'd end up in the porn business?

I come from a pretty conservative family. I never even thought about any of this. I never even considered it because it does have a sort of bad rap. My family is well-known in the community. I can just see, "Hey, Jim. I heard your son is doing porn." [Laughs]

I guess this is as good a way to tell them as any. But -- my poor mom -- my uncle [started operating a porn] pay site about three years ago. It's huge. He's back in Montreal, and he does well. If my parents knew that I was doing this ...

What do you tell your parents you're doing?

Wireless something or other. I'm sure they're going to find out soon enough.

But the more I watched my friend work on his adult site, the more I realized that it's a very interesting business. It's very complex. You have a lot of highly skilled people who are excellent Web designers in this business, excellent marketing people.

Sex is the No. 1 thing on the Internet, and adult people have always been one step ahead of the search engines, the way to spam things, the way to market things. You'll notice that every site now, Yahoo and everyone, pops up windows. Well, guess where that was developed? In our industry, we were responsible for a lot of innovations. People have so much money in our industry, we put a lot of that money back into technology and advertising so that we can market better.


 

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But really, it's not that hard. Everyone is looking for [online porn]. It's just a matter of putting yourself out there. If you go to Metaspy, it watches what people are searching for on the search engines and it gives you a list of 10 words that people are typing in. Three of those words on every refresh, every five seconds, are adult-related. It's No. 1.

Talk about job security. Like I said, you can't worry about that when you're dealing with the No. 1 industry on the Internet.

What are you teaching people in your school?

The course teaches you how to design a gallery -- basically a Web page full of pictures. There are certain sites out there that list your site if you go through a certain procedure and you build your site right. And those sites specialize in getting tons of people -- in the millions, millions of people a day. Those sites are called TGPs -- thumbnail gallery posts. We teach students which TGPs are the best ones and how to be able to look at which of your sites are doing well and sort of optimize them to increase your rate of people signing up.

There are 10 or 20 TGPs that probably dominate in the field. And they attract, probably combined, 20 to 30 million people, and if you get your link on their site up pretty high you get the people.

How exactly do these sites you build make money?

I'm basically an advertiser. When people go to an ad on one of my sites and sign up for membership to a pay site, I get paid a commission. So I get to be creative. There are two ways to get commissions. There's a flat rate -- usually about $35 or $40 per person. So they'll either pay you $35 a person or they'll pay you for how long they're a member, each month -- it will be like $12 a month.

How do you know that you aren't getting ripped off by the pay site?

You don't. There's no way for us webmasters to track, because the people go to the site and sign up with their credit cards. We don't know, which is why you go with the sites that have been in this business for a long time.

How do you get the pictures?

You either do them yourself or you purchase them. There are sites out there that specialize in selling pictures. You put your credit card in and you download a Zip file full of pictures, and you get the license to use them.

Why did you decide to teach a course about it?

When I started doing it, I bought a brand-new Lincoln Navigator in about two weeks. And so my friends are going, "What's going on? I thought you didn't have a job?" So I told them, and they just begged me to teach them how. So I did. Then I figured I'd build a site with my partner who taught me, my friend, and we sat down and wrote a whole course guide, a manual and video tutorials.

Then we started advertising on these porn sites -- "Get paid to look at porn!" -- infomercial-style. And we posted on craigslist. Here's an interesting thing about it ...

. Next page | People in this industry are genuine. They like to have great parties
1, 2, 3



 
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The Free Software Project
Read Andrew Leonard's book-in-progress on Linux and open source -- and post your comments.

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