Originally Posted by rhizome

Yo Quiet, did you ever buy that loft in Montreal? I want that place.

Originally Posted by lazycash

Nice to hear somebody who got out at their peak. Since your uw and uws domains point to nowhere, have you ever considered selling them?

Originally Posted by pimpporn

Great success story. Not being a ball buster but why would you retire so quickly? If I was retired, i doubt I'd be posting here on a regular basis. Are you sure 2005 isn't when you should have retired? jk

Originally Posted by quiet

dude, i have gaps of 3-4 months when i don't post here at all. my real posting days are over, that's all in the past. sure i fire the odd comment here and there (i actually find gfy to be one of the best news sources on the internet, as well as nice place to shoot the shit about whatever). i still use the internet, and this place is a place i have been posting to for almost 10 years. i doubt i will ever completely leave it until it shuts down.

Originally Posted by quiet

shit, what was the question? i went from 6.95, to 8.95, to 12.95, and finally to 18.95, that is the price that made the best profit for us, and was the one we used during the big-time 5 years area.

Originally Posted by Rui

Hello AndreJ!

Originally Posted by andrej_NDC

Did you ever try a higher price? 29.95 or even 39.95? Was there a reason not to use 19.95 and use 18.95 instead?

Originally Posted by Rui

Don't you find it "boring" not having to do any sort of work\manage stuff?

Dont you miss having some "work stuff to do"?

Originally Posted by mopek1

Hey Quiet,

If you had to start from scratch today, how would you do it? What's your take on the industry these days?

Thanks

Originally Posted by quiet

dude, i have gaps of 3-4 months when i don't post here at all. My real posting days are over, that's all in the past. Sure i fire the odd comment here and there (i actually find gfy to be one of the best news sources on the internet, as well as nice place to shoot the shit about whatever). I still use the internet, and this place is a place i have been posting to for almost 10 years. I doubt i will ever completely leave it until it shuts down.

Originally Posted by quiet

hell no. not even close lol. lots of people making FAAAAAAARRRRRR more than me. check out cyberage dave's garage lol. now that's money.

Originally Posted by Mike33

I remember that one of the things that set your site apart was that it had a TON of content compared to 99% of paysites at that time. Back then every paysite was using the same crappy Holio plugins, and images that were shot in the 80s. This was considered to be a standard full paysite members area back then which had zero value in it. You completely ignored that format and instead had lots of quality full length videos updated regularily. It seems like a no-brainer to build a rep with surfers and make solid income, yet it was extremely rare at that time.

Originally Posted by quiet

awesome. can you elaborate at all?

Originally Posted by jimmy-3-way

I was talking single sites, not aff. programs.

Originally Posted by quiet

... the adult industry has changed so much since then ...

Originally Posted by quiet

i have tons of shit to do man. i have to manage money, constantly, i didn't lose any money in the current economic crash, that's because i am all over it.

i am going to start a new small biz here in Whistler, it sounds boring, but it's something really needed in this pain in the ass resort town.

as already stated, i also enjoy traveling the world, reading, snowboarding, downhill biking, hiking, and lots of other things. i am definitely not bored

Originally Posted by mopek1

What in your opinion is the reason for the big decline in sales/conversions in adult?

Lots of people blame tubes/recession which do play a part. I think it's the product quality.

What do you say?

Originally Posted by gornyhuy

He can just die, that would be fine too.

Originally Posted by quiet

this is totally off of the top of my head (i shut the site down 4 years ago lol), but, traffic costs... had to have been 50-60K a month. probably more. hosting was pretty huge, after we'd got all of the servers and hardware we needed, around 35-40K a month, could be more. if DavidD is around, he can probably remember. content was pretty expensive, we gave up our dvd/retail rights to it, just exclusive internet rights, and shot a couple of hours a week. i'm guessing 20-25K a month or so.

why do you even want to know? the adult industry has changed so much since then, it's not going to help you in anyway. weird.

Originally Posted by andrej_NDC

It didn't change that much, really. Most niches don't convert now, but its just because they got boring. Hollywood movies from the 90s wouldn't make shit nowadays in theaters, too. The only thing that really changed is super cheap bandwitch(thanks to the tubes, I guess) and some traffic is cheaper, too. Other than that, adult is still rocking.

Originally Posted by quiet

hmm, it hasn't changed that much? that an interesting take on things. i still push traffic, and it seems to be a completely different landscape vs 4 years ago.

anyway, cheers.

Originally Posted by StuartD

You make it sound too easy.
Good on ya though

Originally Posted by quiet

excessive free porn, cheap bandwidth, no real copywrite inforcement.

Originally Posted by quiet

(American Beauty reference). Anyhoo, people have been asking me for around 7 years to drop the story on my biz. here it is. it will probably bore the fuck out of most of you, so feel free to skip:

1996, i am taking a cyberphilosophy course at the University of Alberta (i think it was numbered 365). we did a bunch of things, but one of the things i took away from it was that this internet thing could make money. before i'd finished uni (major in Genetics, minor in Philosophy), i had a couple of accounts/pages set up with several adult verification services (adultcheck was the one that really got me going). so my parents are stoked that i'm making money, as i'd been a starving student since i started university. gf at the time was stoked too. though i did get both mine and my gf (at the time's) university accounts shut down for excessive usage lol.

around a year later, i started a small (read: shitty) paysite, using interbill as the processor. i don't think many people remember interbill, but anyway, they were super sketchy.

1997, i'm making around 4500 bucks a month, then, interbill stops paying me, and i am freaking the fuck out. in the end, they do actually pony up the amount owed (six months later) but by then i am with ibill, and was just barely able to cover the rent.

how was i getting traffic at this point? spamming the seach engines of course. it was easy as fuck to get a reasonable amount of traffic. infoseek? altavista? yep. load a page full of keywords, upload, and you were good to go. rinse and repeat.

1998, by now, i have an okay income, around 8K a month, life is good for a 24 year old guy straight out of uni. hooked up with a new gf, and using the money i'd save up (around 10K or so), we built a new paysite, and i dropped the 10K on a search engine called goto.com (it's called overture now) for advertising. they were the first (i believe) search engine to offer paid listings. anyway, it was a complete and utter failure lol.

girl leaves me, and things kind of go sour. my income drops to 4K a month, i am seriously considering going back to uni to do a masters, or possibly a trade school (my dad runs a small electrical company).

Then: someone (whoever you are, thank-you) submits one of my random spam galleries to the Hun. BAM. my piddily little virtual account could not handle the traffic (obviously), and i was super pissed. but then the sun came up over the horizon. this could actually be a good thing. i knew that night, that i would become a multi-millionaire. of course, no one i knew believed me lol. i remember telling my dad and my best friend exactly that right after the Hun listing, and they thought i was crazy. i totally understand why though. because it sounded crazy.

1999, i am making a solid 20K a month. pretty happy with everything. enter DavidD, formally of Candid Hosting. gave some great technical advice and super helpful 24 hrs a day. This is the point where i am adding server after server because the demand for my new, high quality (for the time) paysite and especially the endless galleries is going insane.

2000, i start shooting all exclusive video content (not personally lol). redesigned the site (you know what, i have almost told no one this, but i have designed ever reiteration of ultrawiredsex.com myself lol, straight up html by yours truly), and hired a team, an actual team of people, to do nothing but submit to tgps, to buy spots on tgps and build galleries. we worked 100 hours a week, but i paid my employees well. scaled the FUCK out of tgp submission. i also bought all of the top hun listings. they were a bit of a pain in the ass some times, but i got every available listing.

2001, just cranking the submissions, making 350K a month, after expenses. getting the video on every tgp on the planet. nice office in Banff, Canada, with 6 people working around the clock.

2002, i *think* this is about the time Mark (GTS) came into the picture. we cranked their paid submissions about as hard as you can crank anything. MONEY.

2003, not much changed.

2004, ibill goes tits up. i was lucky, and got paid far longer than a lot of other guys. i got paid consisistently until april 2005. they still owe me around a quarter million dollars though. don't think i'll ever see it lol.

2005, retired.

what i did i learn from all of this? SCALE. if you have something, anything, that works, scale that cocksucker up to as high as it will go.

ps: take a flight on the concorde ;)

cheers boys and girls.