+

Cookies on the Business Insider India website

Business Insider India has updated its Privacy and Cookie policy. We use cookies to ensure that we give you the better experience on our website. If you continue without changing your settings, we\'ll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies on the Business Insider India website. However, you can change your cookie setting at any time by clicking on our Cookie Policy at any time. You can also see our Privacy Policy.

Close
HomeQuizzoneWhatsappShare Flash Reads
 

Entrepreneur Explains How To Make Hundreds Of Thousand Of Dollars Per Year Owning A Porn Site

Aug 19, 2013, 22:25 IST

Flickr/trashyRight now the owner of a pornographic website is doing an AMA on Reddit, and the details behind his business are fascinating.

Advertisement

While we have no idea what the website itself is, we can ascertain a few things about the business model. Essentially people buy videos made by studios individually from the site, the proceeds of which are split between the studio and the site.

He claimed to clear $280,000 last year, so evidently people like to watch pornography on the internet. Who knew?

It's worked out, and the owner doesn't actually have to do much work anymore. It's fully automated. "For me," he said, "it made sense as a money generating asset requiring little effort beyond the initial build."

Most interesting of all was the advice the owner gave someone who wanted to start up their own site.

Advertisement

Here's how he explained the sunk costs of getting into the business to an aspiring porn-site entrepreneur:

Good luck with it. It's a challenging industry. Things that would take 20 minutes on a normal business can take days in the adult industry. (finding a payment processor, for example)

A redtube-style site would be quite a challenge, financially, I think. Policing it could also be pretty difficult.

The most expensive part, for me since I did all of my own design and programming, was getting VISA/MC approval for a high risk account. VISA has a $1000 annual fee and MC has a $500 annual fee, at least through my payment processor. [...]

You can make use of Amazon Web Services to lower costs substantially.

Advertisement

Up front the first hurdle is convincing Visa or MasterCard to let you accept payments. Still, that's not even the hardest part. Here's what it takes to get the site up and running:

If I calculated it in hours spent on it myself, looking at around 3 months, so we'll say 500 hours. I charge $65/h if I ever take on freelance clients, so looking at about $32000 for someone at my rate. I'm expensive because of my extensive experience, so you can probably get it done for less.

It was very difficult in the beginning. Luckily my consultant, the girl who convinced me to start the site, is a studio herself and knows a lot of the top studios. We went after the top studios and offered them better %s and it worked. We now have:

751 studios 19,138 videos Apx 5000 visits per day - A good number of which are sent directly from the studios to purchase on the site or send a tribute.

Most of the business, he said, comes from people buying between a dozen and thirty products per day, and then cash donation — 'tributes' — make up the other half of the business.

Advertisement

Here are the technical stats. As he said earlier, the entire operation is automated, with most of the hosting on an Amazon server:

The site itself runs on a single server, a VM actually. It runs PHP with CodeIgniter for the framework and MySQL as the database. I make extensive use of CodeIgniter's caching abilities.

I have an FTP server setup where the usernames and passwords are powered by MySQL. Each studio gets their own FTP login. I have a cronjob that will run every few minutes and pick up files that are finished uploading and send them to Amazon S3 after gathering some basic meta information.

Once the video is safely on S3, the studios can complete the meta data, pricing, and choose when the video goes live.

All the video previews and gifs are uploaded to S3 and served through AWS Cloudfront CDN.

Advertisement

That's about it. Pretty simple.

So if you've ever considered getting into the lucrative online pornography business, that's what you've got to handle first.

Click here to read the full AMA >

You are subscribed to notifications!
Looks like you've blocked notifications!
Next Article