Euro webmasters: Whats it like doing adult sites from Europe?
 

Does a lot of your money come in from euro surfers or do you have mostly American surfers? Do you have to pay a heavy tax?
Do you have any strict regulations there? Do rules change from country to country?

Are there connection issues or slowness from foreign traffic? Do you have any issues with your own connection speeds or is dsl/cable readily available?

Mostly american surfers and 50% of what I make goes to taxes..rules are different in every country/state (...)

Rules vary a lot

American surfers and I don't pay taxes. I get the check, go to the bank and cash it in.

Really depends on the country.

Th rules vary from country to country, even in the european union they are not the same in each member state. The most restrictive rules are in Germany. German laws force the webmaster to proove the legal age of the surfer by a personal contact. The surfer has to sign up and then he is forced to verify his identity by mail. This means, he gets a mail which is delivered to him by personal contact and only if he signed personally he will get access to a site. Quite stupid and anyway typically german.

This law is up since April 1st. 2003 and not strictly practised yet. But the surfer has to signup with the digits of his identity card anyway.

I get 80% of my income from Spanish traffic as i own a Spanish dialer company. The laws are becoming more and more hard against dialers here so i'm going to put a good amount of money now on expanding my biz worldwide.

About taxes there are two ways of paying them:

Taxes to bussines companies: the max is around 35% of your profit after paying all the expenses reated to running your bussines, so the key here is to reinvest a lot on your bussines so you can avoid lots of taxes.

Taxes to individuals: You pay a max of 45% of your profit, this max is applied if you earn more than $150.000 per year. Else it ranges from 1% to that depending on your yearly profit.

Internet conections are slow, max is 2Mb ADSL.

Life is cheap but not as cheap as it was before the euro unification.

interesting, I didn't know the taxes are so heavy.
50% is a LOT

In Portugal the tax situation is similar to the Spanish.

All my sites are in English, except one (English, Portuguese, French and Spanish), so most of my income comes from the States.

I only pay taxes from my day time job. Income from my adult sites goes straight to Switzerland :thumbsup

Company taxes are 30% and I think it's the plan to standardize that throughout EU (if they haven't already).
Income taxes varies alot. Southern/Eastern Europe is lowest (but so are social services etc etc). Prepare to get skinned in Scandinavia. Approx 50-70%.

lol :thumbsup

:thumbsup Yeah, fuck the taxman. :ak47:

mostly US surfers, max 52% tax here...
regulation is easier than US here I guess

Except for Germany there are not that many laws regarding adult, there are mostly greyzones.... and greyzones are much better than black and white.

When you think on european taxes, be in mind that are not as expensive as they seem, as in Eurpeans countries you have tons of services paid by the goberments, like public schools, universities, free health care, hospitals, etc. In the states you could pay less but if you have a serious health problem you will need to sell all your bussines, home etc while all that is free in Europe. In mostly of europeans countries also you get a payment if you lose your work or after you retire at 65 years old. Also in the north European countries you have even more free services by the goberment so the taxes are near 70% there.
I'm not telling that this is a better system, as it also allow lots of lazy guys to live from the hard workers taxes, i'm just telling you why we have high taxes.
As Troels said, companies pay around 30%-35% and you can discount all expenses from operating your bussines so they key is to fund a company and reinvest a good amount of your earnings as i said before.

we get pretty much all british traffic - but then our sites are all UK themed..

Could do with some more US traffic tho....

wassup UKXTRA - wanna trade links?