1. As someone with a decent reputation I get asked to a lot of meetings with people to discuss the "big ideas" of non-programmer types. In those meetings big numbers are always thrown around as to how much money can be made. The one porn project I’ve ever done is THE ONLY time I actually ended up with the big number that had been thrown around ($200,000 for 6 months work in case you were wondering)

2. Working on that site was one of the most fun projects I’ve ever had (and not because of the pornography). From a technical perspective porn pushes the boundaries more than any other area (except maybe pure research). It involves everything from telecommuting (allowing performers to do their jobs from home) to content delivery networks (my first experience with delivering a high number of quality video feeds) to social interaction (porn is more about an emotional reaction than anything else which requires studying how to create an immersive experience). It really does push all your skills.

I mean, in honesty, I wouldn’t do it now that I have some money behind me. But I don’t think there was anything wrong with it and I don’t feel bad about the experience.

As far as hiding your identity, it’s called a shell corporation and it’s not that hard. That said, you aren’t going to be able to completely hide your identity. Some people are going to have to know (you deal with a lot of vendors in that business). If you are going to the trouble of creating a new HN account it probably isn’t for you.

Here's some business advice:

What exactly is your secret sauce that's going to make your site better than (or even halfway as good as ) all of the thousands of competing sites? There's no free way to make money.

Here's some moral advice:

Don't spend your time doing things you're ashamed of.

At different times, I have thought of all sorts of business ideas, and one of them was for pornographic shower curtains. Search the internet and I think you'll find there are few, if any, competitors in this space.

I think your market is people looking for gag gifts, frat boys, gay men, and swinger types.

To create this business, you should develop a website and translate it to a few European languages (particularly German), keep it very small and focused on various types of sexy shower curtains, and you could market it a few ways.

Do like Playboy and the other skin mags and send freebies to frat houses. Attend a sex convention or two. And advertise on various porn sites.

For production, you can get these made in China for a few dollars each, and I think you can probably charge 19.99-29.99, depending on the version. I've done research on producing things in China, and I'm thinking you can get them for under $5 each if you buy a thousand of them, and significantly less as you scale.

At the beginning, for shipping, I think you'll want to just have a big stack and do it yourself, but you'll eventually hire someone as you scale up.

I agree that it will be tough to make a good porn site, competing in a saturated market against well-funded players, but I think you could get into the shower curtain business, use the internet for distribution, and carve out a very nice niche for yourself.

If you are worried about it being to risque, keep the curtains erotic and soft core.

Porn is often the first (commercial) industry to take advantage of many new technologies (DVD, the internets, etc), but even then there's probably tons of room to innovate.

For example, I recently saw a porn recommendation engine posted on Reddit that used collaborative filtering and all that fun stuff. AFAIK there aren't many sites out there that do recommendation, even though it seems pretty obvious.

I suppose StumbleUpon would work as a recommendation engine.

http://www.reddit.com/r/nsfw/comments/7qz7t/reddit_please_he...

http://www.nakedtube.com/recommend

A little more about it:

NakedTube.com Revolutionizes Adult Video Discovery with Powerful Search and Recommendation Engines http://www.klixxx.com/new/index.php?option=com_content&v...

... lots more innovation to come :)

Ironically, your HN submission on this very topic was killed: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=redman

Maybe requiring a login to use the engine is too large a barrier of entry? We've been planning to offer an "anonymous" engine for non logged in users but don't have it slated until after our UI redesign.

It seems to me that is generally the case on the web. There was some discussion about login requirements as barriers here on HN recently.

You should allow use of the site without a login. Just have them log in if they want to save their preferences. Don't make email required. Why would I want to give my email address to a porn site?

I just recently took the plunge and made a porn site. I'm not ashamed of it, but I feel like it could get socially inconvenient if other people expect me to be ashamed of it. Overall I would prefer not to work in porn than work in porn, but just for social convenience.

FWIW, it's the porn recommendation engine mentioned in a sibling post. It is very NSFW, contains weird porn, etc, but the URL is http://fapseek.com

Meanwhile, while it may not fit the quick-buck model implied here, I suspect there are many untapped opportunities in classy or mainstream pornography or erotica.

Having just read the long and rewarding Playboy interview of Steve Jobs from the mid-80s (currently on the HN homepage), I'm reminded that the world is waiting for a new generations of what might be called respectable pornography.

There's a misnomer if ever I saw one. The only way those 2 words go side by side is the day a porno wins "Best Picture" at the Academy Awards.

I don't disrespect people who work in the porn industry. However, naivety aside, unless you are lucky enough not to have to deal with Protestant America, your'e better off not going down that road.

And the quality of the plastic surgery.

And the quality of the set.

And the hirsuteness of the male "models" (ugh).

but maybe you can use your need for privacy to invent something new for the web. everyday services are getting better and better at finding out more about the consumers visiting their sites.

a lot of people may not be ashamed of their porn, but they may just want to keep it private.

One of my most memorable interviews was when a company took me through the cubicle farm in a SOMA warehouse where the "live on webcam" girls and guys were performing. (To tell the truth, the setup was a bit depressing.)

I ended up taking a job at an ISP, not because I had any moral objection to working on porn, but because it seemed like I'd be working on a lot more interesting stuff and had a lot more potential for future advancement.

On my first day, my boss gives me a project to work on: get the streaming porn working for his side business.

My point is that I would just go with it, I know people that are in that businees, and to my knowledge they have never had any problems. Neither socially nor in business.

The social norms may be stricter where you are from, so take this with a grain of salt.

For inspiration on how far you can take it if you choose this road look at Private Media Group liste on NASDAQ: http://finance.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ%3APRVT

Yes maybe the mentality of the US is still lagging (lots of old people still cling to their religion), but our actions are probably the most progressive in the entire world (we don't need a law to change that)

Our broadcast standards may be a little looser than they were 20 years ago, but it's really not much. Our society as a whole has become more socially conservative over the last 40 years too.

Finally, the Internet is a global place, and it doesn't really matter what the US thinks about a porn site based in the EU or in Japan.

that said, most people I know and deal with on daily basis are against porn in general... the society for the most part is againt porn or hide the fact that they watch it.

I have a very good idea for a simple porn site that I can start for 5k (including legal fees) that can get me 2-3K paid users.. its frankly brilliant and the loss if it doesnt work out is not that great. I need an income badly, disparate times... they really are :(

My other site gets 15k traffic a day, we have been blogged 1000s of times in different languages, there are 100s of reviews about us, however, traffic is not getting any better and I have had enough! My new start up is launching this month, If i do start the porn site it wont be till april/may (if the new startup doesnt pick up) So its pretty much my last 2 months.. then I will have ran out of money and I will have no choice but get a real job which I havent done in 10 years.

thanks again guys

I don't think you can really know most people are truly against porn unless you spend all your time with these people.

As an example, perhaps you someone who's stolen a porn magazine from their parents? Of performed a particular sexual act your partner enjoys, that they later state disdain for when dicussing with their friends?

[Wikipedia founder Jimmy] Wales undertook was the creation of the web portal Bomis, which featured user-generated webrings and that, according to The Atlantic Monthly, "found itself positioned as the Playboy of the Internet." For a time the company sold erotic photographs, and Wales described the site as a "guy-oriented search engine" with a similar market to Maxim. Although Wales is no longer connected with the company, his involvement with Bomis has been criticized

1. It was kind of unconventional stuff - not illegal, but more like "ouch, my eyes" sorts of things. Not fun.

2. The people involved in it were pretty sleazy individuals, and also fairly lame in terms of simply being unprofessional and not pleasant to work with. Could have just been a bad experience.

And, because the whole operation was kind of shitty, it didn't even really make that much money, so, like others say, it's not a free ticket to tons of cash.

However, I'm suspicious of the "it's an easy way to make quick money" statement. In my experience (and I started a business that used MLM for its distribution with a friend before - not as disreputable as porn, but also generally looked down on imho), even those apparent shortcuts require insane amounts of work... so the suggestion that you can somehow do it on the side to tide you over seems suspicious. You can start a porn site - but it'll take all your time for 6 months to a year... so if your 2nd start-up is about to launch, I'd give it a miss unless you're prepared to forget about your 2nd start-up for a year.

As for whether I'd do business or be associated with someone in the porn industry: it depends a lot on circumstances, and the particular organization I'm working on behalf of. As a programmer, I don't care, and porn might actually be a plus on your resume because it tends to get high traffic and give you experience with scaling problems.

But if it was on behalf of an organization like FictionAlley or the Flash games site(s) my startup was trying to do, I'd stay far away. Because these are largely aimed at teens (and tend to get lots of pre-teen visitors as well, even though COPPA in theory should keep them away), and it's not worth the PR disaster that'd come from any association with porn.

Of course Newgrounds.com has always used their policy of accepting almost anything to gain media attention and viewers. For instance they currently have a flash up created by Jeff Weise, who was the gunman in the Red Lake High School massacre. They also host games concerning the Oklahoma city bombing, the V-tech massacre, and suicide bombers.

I doubt that the pr from objectionable flash content has hurt them at all. And I don't think they have had any legal trouble concerning the porn on there. Also I doubt that it has affected their business deals. This could just be because their main focus is not porn, and right now they are one of the major players in flash gaming.

Link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newgrounds#In_the_media

The worry is that if you try to partner with big entertainment properties like Disney or WB and they find out you have a porn programmer on staff, they may nix the deal. Because you can bet that some gossip rag like Valleywag will eventually run a story like "Is Disney sponsoring porn?" all about how a company that Disney does business with has some lead developer whose side project is a porn site. Elsewhere on the thread I say that reasonable people "decay" relationships by social distance. Well, tabloids are not reasonable people.

IIRC we had an issue with this at FictionAlley. We had a sister site called RestrictedSection.org that was for NC-17 HP fanfiction. It was a separate organization but had many of the same people involved, and we'd help each other with technical stuff and such. When FA got Warner Brother's blessing, part of the condition was that there would never be anything more than R-rated on the site, and we needed a warning for anything more than PG-13. And concurrent with that, a wall went up between FA and RS.org - you had to pick one to be involved in, and we didn't help each other out so much any more. WB actually had a great relationship with FA but a somewhat antagonistic one with RS.org.

From a practical perspective, I doubt that you have a moral outlook to make much money doing it. There are probably easier ways to make money: a tax on your feeling of self-worth and morality is expensive to pay.

+ don't forget, there are something like a million porn sites out there competing with you, so unless you pick some sick shit involving grannies in wheelchairs or midgets, you'll be hard pressed to gain paying customers.

As far as dealing with someone involved in porn? Its honestly not something you have to think about. Once you get big enough with porn(to pay the bills), you won't want to do a legit startup anyways. A porn site is pretty much a license to print money. Even if you have a mere 1,000 users, at $20 month, you already make 20 grand a month without doing any major work.

I ask cuz I had a friend who was really into this idea about 7 years ago and actually did all the legwork and research into who makes money and how. He decided that actually making any money in porn involved a lot more work than simply getting another job.

In a supposedly enlightened modern world, and more importantly a world in which every man with a computer uses it several times a week to view porn and nearly every man and woman masturbates daily, is there really so much shame in being the person who provides those services?

I have no data on who the most financially successful sex aid and porn makers are, but we certainly all know of some success stories, and we know them by their legal names: Hugh Hefner, Sasha Grey, Larry Flynt. The founders of JimmyJane (a high-market sex toy maker and seller) are out in the open, as is their investor Tim Draper.

Sex sites aren't exactly parallel to porn sites, but it's the closest comparison I have. In its early days, Boffery will need every advantage I can give it, and one is my small amount of notoriety online (both as Nick Douglas and as "the first editor of Valleywag").

I've heard a few stories: FriendFinder calls itself a "social network" when talking to money people. JimmyJane has a different corporate name, but one still assumes Tim Draper knows exactly what he's investing in.

In short, if you don't want to be associated with your industry, you're at a huge disadvantage (your competitors will profit from risking more of their personal reputations) and possibly even have some moral questions to ask yourself. Why do you want to spend time profiting from anything if you feel it would taint your name?

But if you decide you are comfortable with it, is it really realistic to be running to unrelated websites at the same time? Your friend knows a lot more about it then I do, so how much time a week are you talking about to run a porn site? Are you wanting to create your own content, or just host other people's content? I really doubt you will be able to keep your name unconnected to the porn industry if you decide to create your own content. I think this situation would be somewhat comparable to working full time and working on your masters at the same time. It might be doable,but the quality of both projects will probably suffer, since you are focused on working on two separate things. So I'd advise you not to do it.

In other words,

If you don't want to be associated with porn then don't associate yourself with porn.

Most people "decay" social relations as they get farther away. Presumably, you want to like everyone that you associate with. But if one or two of the people they associate with is somehow objectionable, you kinda write it off as bad taste and tolerate them as best as possible, as long as you're not invited to the same dinner parties. And most people don't care at all who their friends-of-friends-of-friends are.

If you believe the 6-degrees-of-separation theory, this is a very good thing. Otherwise, we'd all be connected to some serial killer, or traitor, or banker. Heck, if you go out even 2 degrees of separation, I'm sure there are people in my social network that I find rather detestable.

http://venturebeat.com/2005/12/21/adultvest-investment-commu...

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...

http://www.hedgeco.net/news/06/2008/adultvest-hedge-fund-acq...

Just do good work, then.

I can think of a few things that were done well, but for which the perpetrators ought not be proud. Consider the Banco Central burglary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banco_Central_robbery_at_Fortal...). Beautifully executed, but the burglars' selfishness cost the people of Brazil a fortune.

In the extreme, consider Hitler, who was tremendously efficient at terminating Jews under the Third Reich. Should that efficiency exonerate him from any shame?

My examples are ridiculous, but I'm only trying to make the point that how you feel ethically about your work is a function of what that work is, not a function of how well you perform it.

It's porn, people. Porn is pictures of people having sex. Consensually. Over minority age.

You can say "BUT NOT ALWAYS!" but if the dude's worried about his rep enough to hide himself on HN, do you really think he's gonna do that?

b) Unpopular opinions should not be downmodded on this site merely for being unpopular. (I don't even know if this one is unpopular -- it merely is thought to be unpopular, like expressing a moral judgment on something is verboten in polite society, which is of course a moral judgment in itself. There are approximately 47 people here who said some variation of "Ick, I don't want to be associated with porn" without being censored, so I see no particular reason to bust the chops of someone who doesn't like porn qua porn rather than merely not liking porn qua job opportunity.)

I don't think most people need much conditioning to have a sex drive...

It seems self-evident to me that if a man is using porn heavily for self-gratification, he's not going to view a randomly-met woman as a whole person (and vice versa? I don't really know), but instead will be judging her based on how "hot" she appears to him, or how she might feed his fantasies. (That's the "just body parts" in my original quip.)

This is tremendously corrosive for society as a whole, and both sexes suffer the results.

There was a HN link a while back (Three Myths about Porn: http://www.reuniting.info/science/three_myths_about_porn) which I think made a pretty good argument that online pornography is like crack cocaine to the male brain--a complete overload of normal circuits. (Even if the point of the containing site is, um, rather bizarre.) And it leaves many, many men hopelessly addicted.

Sorry, but the majority of men in my experience do that anyway. So either they're all 'using porn heavily for self-gratification', or they're just red blooded males who like the way women are put together.

I hate to say it, but I think you should lighten up a bit...

For one, there's serious capital outlay. Producing porn is not cheap. Good female performers charge $1k-$2k per scene. Males are $300-$500, but significantly less reliable. They're really more important too, since their job is much more demanding. Thanks to lubricants, a female can pretty much phone it in so any hot model will do. But good luck finding a guy who will show up, not be coked out, and be able to get it up and keep it up, and pop when and where you tell him to. You're going to have entire shoots largely wasted due to this.

You have to rent locations, camera men, lighting people. You're easily looking at $4k-$5k per scene. To get people to pay money, top sites put out 10 or more scenes per week. Can you fund this until reach the critical mass needed to break even? If so I suspect you wouldn't be considering doing this in the first place.

You have to move to L.A. pretty much. That's where all of the adult modeling agencies are, and California is the only state in which shooting a porn does not constitute illegal prostitution.

You have to design the web software, which is not trivial. You're delivering videos so your incremental costs are high. You have to deal with payments, which usually means a very expensive third-party provider. The rake is high because of the very high rate of charge backs (which usually occur when the wife sees the charge on the monthly statement and the husband suddenly can't determine what it is and decides its bogus) which in turn makes credit card companies often decline those purchases, so the processors play a game of cat and mouse (much like companies that process payments to casinos, which is how I know this part) by changing their business names and category codes. In fact, you need multiple processors, because each one on its own will fail a large portion of the time. It wouldn't be worth your time to try to process payments yourself.

You have to set up and run an affiliate program, which is the main way these sites get traffic. That will require networking with some of the millions of free sites. You have to find a good way of getting content to them, running promotions. The major sites pay up to 70% in affiliate fees.

People tend to think that because the industry is unsavory, it therefore is less competitive, but really the opposite is true. Just like selling drugs is way more competitive than selling tires (to my knowledge Goodyear employees don't run drivebys on local Firestone plants) porn is way more competitive than most other industries.

Norman Schwarzkopf

The only way you can make decent money quick in the porn business is if one, you know how to get and drive traffic to the right sites and two, you can optimize which sites to send your traffic to based on their conversion ratio and payout amounts. There's no way to make money quick as a porn producer...just as an affiliate or some other traffic referrer and even then you are going to wait a minimum of a month to two months before you see that money because porn companies are going to make sure you're aren't scamming them with signups where you are buying memberships with stolen numbers. And as a true distributor? Well, that's going to take a while because you have to shoot the porn, edit the porn, get the bank to approve the type of porn you're doing, setup an affiliate network, get the traffic to come to your site and actually sell it. And that's after paying out a bunch of money to models and other folks. Therefore, I'm concluding you are going to be an affiliate. Good luck. Even sites like YouPorn don't make that much money from affiliate sales and they drive a crapload of traffic...although admittedly their traffic is sucky because they like free porn. It takes a while to get going as an affiliate. I have a friend that drives traffic to dating sites and he makes decent money at it but it's a time sink to be honest. Also, vanilla porn is way down from what I hear...there's so many companies making it and there's so much free stuff out there that it's just not the money maker it used to be.

I'd ask your friend how long it took him before he was making REAL money. I mean, unless you guys are just amazing and finding good quality traffic (that's the rub) it's really hard to make money quickly in the porn affiliate world.

Why don't you just have him "hire" you to make rent money and start up a bunch of new sites or projects for him so it's under his name and you never have to worry about it. He can keep them going later and reap the profits. You can even do it under the table if necessary so there's no messy legal trail for someone to find. Seems a lot easier to me.

What sort of traffic are we talking here? And what sector? If it's the right traffic, you don't need much to make lots of money...

I'd say you're faced with a few ways of raising capital, one of which is investing in a porn site. While web sites may be web sites, I'd suggest that running an adult-themed one is more problematic than most because people will always think themselves clever and try and crack their way in past your pay-wall. Without the right precautions, this could take a fair bit of time to either set up or, in the case of breeches, to patch up the compromised accounts.

If you don't want to get directly involved, you might want to consider exploring what you can do to make money from that sort of thing without running a site yourself. For example, this friend of yours may need some technology developed for their properties, and as you have many developers on hand, it could be trivial to crank out something like that for profit without impacting your other project too badly.

That way you get better at doing what you're best at, such as development, without getting distracted over the long-term with other side projects.

I will humbly point out that porn clicks are some of the least valuable clicks in the industry. Sites like YouPorn, with huge traffic, aren't exactly making a killing (they aren't going broke, either, as far as I know, but a handful of these sites are in the top 50 on the Internet...there are non-porn sites that are dramatically less popular that are making a lot more money). If you expect an easy road to that level of popularity and traffic, and expect your porn site revenues to be respectable very quickly and without a lot of work, I suspect you'll be disappointed.

That said, there have now been a few reasonable exits for adult Internet businesses in the past two years. Before that, it would have been foolish for someone who wanted to be really rich to start a porn site...unless they planned to go "all in" in the industry and become a major player for years to come. It's still far less likely for a porn startup to be acquired than a non-porn startup, and this is reflected in the hesitance of VCs in investing in adult startups (it just doesn't happen, and it's not because the majority of VCs would have ethical issues with such investments). And, going public is pretty much impossible for a porn business, so the VCs that are looking for a huge score are simply not going to be interested. Of course, if you're bootstrapping, you don't care about VCs or exits.

All of that said, about six or seven years ago I did some infrastructure work for one of the top-tier porn empire builders (I won't name names, but at the time, his network was very likely the second largest). He paid on time, was a joy to work with, and had very serious hardware running his sites. He had no problem spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for expenses (his bandwidth bill the month I worked for him was $86k, for example, and that was after he'd negotiated a new deal that dropped those expenses by tens of thousands per month), so his revenue was obviously respectable. But, he'd worked hard to build it--it took several years to reach that level. He worked directly with the content providers who were creating new branded content exclusively for his network, he had his own porn ad network (because he had 30 or so brands to promote, he could buy in large blocks, and also could barter with friendly competitors), and he was extremely focused (which I think might be lacking for you, if you're thinking of porn as a stopgap measure just until your "real" project gets going).

I know several people who have had some level of success building small projects specifically for revenue generation, and I don't think you have to go the porn route to get there. Since you're obviously uncomfortable with that path...why not choose something else that provides recurring revenue without a huge investment of time? Widgets, iPhone apps, Flash games, etc. all are pretty small projects that can produce a few hundred a month in revenue.

Or, perhaps you should be seeking investors for your "real" project. That's how most successful tech businesses were started, you know?

I think the financial model of porn is easy enough to grok, if you can get a lot of traffic to a legit site, then I don't imagine that you can't make a porn site work. It's really just a matter of figuring out what folks are buying and start selling it and if you're seedy enough you can find the right models, etc... It's probably easier in a lot of respects. What might be harder is "going legit" after that.

Without passing judgment, porn seems to be one of those addictive sorts of things, once you're in it or into it, getting out isn't always that easy. Especially if you've known "success" with it and not really in other ways. It's sort of a stereotype.

I've known a couple entrepreneurs that had experience with porn, running ISPs and providing various technical services, in the post-porn world they seemed to have a swarthyness to them that get in the way of a lot of things. I can't say if they were that way before or if it was something they picked up along the way but they just have different attitudes about the worker bees and people working for them as well as those providing services they purchase. The easiest way to describe it is a lack of respect on some human level; it's hard to say, they have employees come and go and it's just different, the people are almost all pissed when the leave and a lot more leave than do some of the other companies around here.

I don't have a huge amount of experience in this area...but the one guy I worked with was absolutely fantastic to work with. In fact, he seemed so grateful that I was treating him like any other customer that he went out of his way to be nice in return. Of course, I was not his employee; I was a contractor and a vendor of software. This may have changed the dynamic, and perhaps he put on a more polite face when going outside of the porn industry. This may, even, have been part of his formula for success: the ability to play effectively in both the porn world and the straight business world successfully.

I do know the music industry a lot better, having spent a lot more time in it, and I kinda suspect the attitudes are similar in all "talent" based industries (e.g. businesses where you have a very clear line between the people who have and make the money and the people who are the "talent", whatever that talent might be). It breeds a very contentious working relationship, generally, with not a lot of trust or respect going either direction. So, I guess I can see working on the business side in the porn industry leading to the same sort of attitude that rock and roll club owners usually have (pay as little and as late as possible, treat the "talent" as expendable and interchangeable so they don't get uppity, etc.), and the other side being quite mercenary, with no loyalty to their employers (and with good reason).

No. Don't do it. Your name will get associated with porn and you will not be able to get rid of it completely in the future, even if you will want to. Just my advice...

Then don't. In my experience your respect for yourself is a hundred times more valuable than money.

If it made business sense, of course. I certainly wouldn't turn it down on "moralistic" grounds.

Frankly, I'm tired of all the bogus social stigma against a healthy interest in sex and porn.

http://www.nakedtube.com/about

If you can't convert your traffic, maybe you should spend time investigating how to get people to convert, how to make products that they want, how to market & sell & reach people effectively, etc.

Don't just give up on it and flip to the next project, which you won't fully invest in either, like a schizophrenic hummingbird.

If you've got the traffic, you can make money with it. If you're willing to study, test, and learn.

9 out of 10 people you come across in that industry are not people you want to deal with.

Trust me.