What was the Industry Like When You First Got Started?
 

Considering how young the Adult Online Industry is ('90's) it's pretty crazy how fast things change even over the course of a few years. I got in mid 2005 at the tale end of the big affiliate days when cars were still given away at shows, there were webmasters who were slinging it and considered "whales" because of the amount of traffic and sales they had, and solo girls were the hottest thing that folks were pushing. There was also two big things happening in the industry, Ibill shutting down and Alberto Gonzales and his 2257 crusade.

What year did you start and what was going on then that you remember most?

1 gallery listing on thehun = 100+ joins 1999-2000

In 1991 I was filming using two tiny little Lowell lights with a Hi-8mm camera or with a big crew and Beta SP for feature adult movies. The primary means of distribution was on VHS to retail video stores and mailorder or for broadcast tv. The main adult convention in January in Las Vegas was a roped off section of CES. There was no organized health testing (AIM Healthcare wasn't founded until 1998). The internet was in its infancy so no one had email or web sites and models had to snail me me their Polaroids to be considered for casting!

When I started in 1999 you could keyword stuff a page, submit it to AOL and Altavista and get listed within 48 hours. There was no real key to a good listing. Sometimes I would get a top 5 spot, sometimes nowhere in the top 100, but you could build and submit 50 sites a day so it added up fast.

I love hearing these stories. :) I've only been in this industry since late 06, but even then I agree, it changes so fast.

Ah the good old days. Late 1997 I registered my first adult domain. Still got it although I had to re-register it in early 1998. Those were the days you could register a domain for free and hold it for 3 months trying to genrate traffic. If nothing happened you let the domain expire. I owned 300 domains. none paid for. until mid 1998. At which point I kept only a few. Sending traffic to playgal and xpics. Dean got the good traffic and xpics got the crap stuff! I remember the days when the brisbane mafia had something like a quarter of all the web traffic at the time. People stuffing keywords for n64 and other mainstream stuff and pumping it at porn. I never got into this as my adult traffic was making me enough money. But some of those guys were making 400-500 joins a day. Crazy stuff!

I remember my breakthrough.
I had a gallery on the hun. My very first there. Later that day I found out I had one on worldsex as well. Sales came in like crazy and the feeling I had that day was one big continual orgasm.
A month later the hosting bill came in an I panicked.

Back in 2001, modchip.com and mod-chip.com used to pay 2 cents per click (not even counting conversions).

like a fairy tale....

Hey Jenni- I remember when you started. Man did we go through some crazy shit to get to where we are now! Congrats for sticking it through, I know I thought about throwing in the towel a few times.

There were fewer morons in the business back then.

A damn site easier than it is today. I think I made more money in my second year in this business than I did last year, 8 years in. Most affiliates are doing it tough these days.

"Market Penetration Specialist" :1orglaugh Love it.

1998, post a few pics on usenet groups and get tons of signups to a paysite.

Get listed in yahoo in a few days. Heck at one point was even able to call Yahoo on the phone and talk to a real person about my submission.

Getting listed in DMOZ didn't take forever, all you had to do was know an editor, or become one yourself.

It was the wild wild west of SE submissions, getting listed was easy, manipulating SE results was a cake walk.

Certainly things were a lot more unregulated than they are today.

he he he hosting , we had joined Adult Check in 99, had a limited bandwith package, all of a sudden we are peaking and getting shut down, hammered with all the traffic. Had to raise the allowed bandwith 3 times before it was enough to handle it all:1orglaugh:thumbsup

Try 2001-2002 with easily obtainable google traffic... before every retard on the internet started telling every other retard how valuable it was.

8k easily a month with the triple x guys

I remember a majorly sexy woman approaching me with a huge sample of Fleshlight in Amsterdam 06

Other than that it was in general a much more relaxed environment.

I got in around 03-04,

I can remember crazy amount of cash being spent on promos and giveaways and really busy shows with big stands etc

Started in 1999 with AdultCheck and done better than I expected.

Later had my share in everything from paysites, tgps, picposts, etc.

1999, The Hun, TGPs, CJs, toplists, etc.

yep, i had tons of 'doorways'..stupid me though i used them to increase the traffic to my own free sites instead of sending them directly to sponsors. Ah well. It was still fun though. I put in 6 months of hard work and then sailed for the next 2 doing next to nothing and making lots of money.

My first experience with the porn industry was in the late 60s in Europe. Everything was shot on film then. You had to know someone who would process and duplicate them. It was tough. Scenes were usually around 10 minutes long, lead in, sex and finish.

When I got back into it in 1977 was selling photographs of girls via mail order. It was a great sideline to my main job. Was making $500 a week once it got under way. Spent most of the night answering orders and sending out the pictures. A year later I sold my first set to a magazine company for inclusion in Mayfair. It was of my first wife.

In 1988 when I turned full time, video was in it's infancy for all but the big companies. I bought a consumer VHS video camera and started shooting tapes to sell mail order. Had 3 VHS players wired together to copy them. Then came the orders. Selling a 100 tapes of each title, in the first few weeks was easy copying them on 3 machines was not. LOL Found a professional duplicator and Astral Blue was born.

My first involvement with the Adult Internet was around 1996. A guy I knew in the UK who had moved to San Francisco. He was selling CD discs, via his website, of solo girl pictures I shot for the magazines. He was paying $10 a picture. LOL The problem was people would buy the discs and put it up on their sites and I spent half my time chasing them. some of these people are still around and joke how they got started pirating content.

1998 sold pictures via brokers like Scarlet, 2000 started the content stores.

The biggest problem in the early years was from the police. I had my door knocked on or kicked in a few times over the years. They never found anything because there was nothing illegal to find. But it looked good on their reports that they were hassling a local pornographer.

I started 2004, hun was still good, then blogs came, then tubes, and ratios were fucked up.

jeez i dont want to talk about it bush fucked things up thats for sure.

Same here except I was using freehosts (remember them?) that were Hun approved...until I burned so much bandwidth they shut me off. 20 sponsor provided pics, build a gallery with one banner and watch the sales roll in. "Those were the daaaaays", ala The Bunkers.

1994 I was working with an audiotext company in LA. We picked up a license for the "Virtual Dreams" system, and people were mailing checks and money orders, and even cash through the regular mail to see the content.

In late 1994 we got a merchant account through the Bank of Beverly Hills, (who had no idea what the internet was!), and they gave us a point-of-sale machine. People would BBS their credit cards numbers to us, or give them to us over the phone, and we would punch the numbers into the terminal, get an approval, and BBS their password back to them.


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07... was paying $3 per Gig of BW, I almost broke down when I saw a banner of mine (more of an hpa) costing a couple hundred dollars in BW in one day... it looked very cool but at well over 100 Kb it was huge for that time

I also remember transcoding video using a broadway card and some free compressor software to squeeze my 1 minute clips down to 5 Mbs and loving them I could view them full screen and they were clear (at 800x600) LOL

Thats a great story! :thumbsup:thumbsup

Ha. Me too man.

Great stories so far! Amazing how the industry has changed SO much in such a short time.


Raja!!! You were my industry networking guru! Those were some crazy ass times. We need a tshirt that says we survived Hurricane Fletch. :helpme:winkwink:

Thanks for the visual Patrick :Graucho

:1orglaugh That was a great show, and Fleshlight was an awesome client, but I remember a few months later being in January, and something involving you and some ironing taking place in my friend Justin's room. :1orglaugh See you in August?


Keep the stories coming guys! This is awesome! (Don't forget to include the year you dove into the Online pool)

I actually had my own Yahoo rep. I cried the day he "retired".

I remember over $10k a month in rebills that overnight went to $0 thanks to DMR :disgust

Oh and I dove in in '98

In 2001 I was making over $3k per month doing nothing more than sending clicks to 2 pages. Easy as fuck. Got old & boring real fast and I quit doing it after a very short time... like a couple of months.

that's why i saw those everywhere on warez sites.

I still got the picture, you want it?

Got no B2B agenda as of now so I'll stay over here, btw. Jenni check my Education series gfy-educational-series/971199-effectively-press-promote-business.html as you might actually enjoy that, will be glad to hear feedback from a major professional :pimp

Off for today

i started around '00 but didn't make good money until '05.

I made about 5000 pages that were exactly the same with metatag loaded images and links to the other 4999 pages then submitted them to Alta Vista. I didn't know how to automate it so I made them all by hand in Explorer and Homesite.

A couple of years later made sites with 10 pictures and some crappy graphics and submitted them to DMOZ. Ah, those were the days! :)

i think it has been very well i am just getting started but the views an sign up have been wonderful but i think it can be better in the near future but i started 2010

Woke up, checked AC Gold Module, Smiled.