How Did You Find Your Way To Working In The Adult Industry?

I dont recall having seen this question posted on GWW so figured it was about time it got asked :)

How did you decide that you wanted to be an adult webmasters?

I know for me it started out as a hobby once i sold my online bookstore a few years ago, just wanted to do something while spending the money i made and porn seemed to be the ideal solution LOL

After a few months i realized there was some pretty decent money to be made so started doing it more and more and well, the rest is history as they say.

So how did you find your way to slinging porn for a living?

Regards,

Lee

I started on my 18th birthday actually. A friend of mine that worked for a company called "Babe.net" suggested that it was something I should do. From then on I have been addicted!

Though I'm not a webmaster, my jump into the porn business came after my dear friend Tala saw my earlier writings of yaoi (gay asian anime). So she offered me a job selling stories written about real people. And the rest is history.

Funny how things turn around. I had a boy friend that lived in the south. Im in new york. He thought I had guys over every night. So, I started to run my web cam for him to check up on me from time to time. I’m not really sure how other people found out about the url but, guys started to watch
About that time there was nothing really free for Asian so I started a links page, pony’s Asian temple, and that lead to world twink.

I was just your average porn surfer that got really frustrated not being able to find what I was looking for... masculine men. And I'm still having that problem today, lol. Twinks are still every-fucking-where, but I'm doing my best to fight the good fight. ;)

I was doing pro video and photography in the public sector, but was getting burned out and wanted a mid-life career change. After watching some breathtakingly awful amateur twink vids, I decided to give it a shot myself on a part-time basis, but within a year I needed to go full time. That was 6 years ago that I quit my job... gave up my benefits... and started doing something I really enjoy. Loving what you do makes all the difference.

Funny how I got started. I was looking for a business and tried a couple non adult businesses that did not work out. I was also looking for a boyfriend at the time online and every guy just wanted sex. The two kindof mingled together amd I started my first straight porn site in 96. From there is has been a crazy but fun road.

Mark

Basically followed the logical process of computers to web to adult all in the space of about 12 months.

Cheers,

Allan

I worked at Cox Communications and the internet started booming. I taught myself HTML in my spare time then tried to drag Cox Communications to online services and was frustrated with how long it was taking because I saw the massive potential. In my spare time I created the second national searchable database of apartments online in 96/97 and competed with rentnet.com. I Sold the business then lived a little. I was taking a course in programming and managing an apartment complex by the beach as a favor for my friend who owned it. A hot straight guy came in, he couldn't afford an apartment. We started talking. I told him I was a programmer. He said I should make porn sites and he'd be the star. I said ok! Talked to a hot chick at school that was a stripper, she got her friends in, he got his friends in and moved into my place, and the rest is history. :D Now I live in Australia, travel and work on new projects.

i've always been in adult. i managed a strip club, owned phone sex numbers, managed a dungeon. i even recorded some phone sex tapes. we wanted to try the internet for our phone sex ads, and somehow we ended up going full time on the web.

and here we still are ;)

I guess we could all start out with a .. Funny how I got started.

I started researching a game development project- because there were sexual components to it, I thought the adult entertaimnemt biz would keep my ass out of the sling.

Four months into the R&D - we lost 2 designers to relocation and I was not happy. I hate waste, even if it is time. I still had my start up monies, and figured two intellegent ppl with some skills could make a go of it in porn.

A year to the day of my first post we are the proud owners of 2 pay sites, a hub and with several new projects in the works. Slow and steady wins the race!

I was making small company websitse as a hobby for friends & family & met a guy who told me I could make some money showing off online especially with my html knowledge (this was 95)

Too bad I didn't take his advice until 99..... :goof:

While working at a video store, I was teaching myself web design and Photoshop. After about 3 years, I was leaving my shift at the video store and saw a notice on the lobby board for "Junior Web Design." They wanted the skills I had and they said I needed to be comfortable with adult content. A month later, I was working at MANcheck.

Cheers
Dzinerbear

Well for me it was simply killing time. Mostly surfing and talking with some people and then one day this one friend asked me to write him a story, did and he thought it should be online. So it all began for me. He was a nice guy too but got outed in small town america and wound up killing himself. So the stories were a way to vent and as they say, rest is history.

Ian

My first job out of college was at a phone sex company. I was the audio tech and spent my days listening to and editing the voice personals tapes (all on cassette answering machines, ugh) and getting voice talent in to record the fantasy lines and intros to the various phone services. I loved the idea of working at a place where I could be myself not have to dress up or be overly conservative. I tried a few other types of jobs after that outside of the industry but then I heard of a job in content sales a few years ago and got back into the industry. After trying other things I have to admit that I still love this industry for the same reasons, I love that I can be creative and be myself and not have to put on a facade and pretend to be something I'm not. Plus, I've met some of the greatest people in this community. I consider myself lucky to be involved in it. :)

Well, It wasn't me who found the job, but the job who found me! Really!

Well, a friend who was unemployed at the time approached me about designing some sites and she'd do the promo end of it all ... after a couple months she went back to working a regular job and dropped the whole thing in my lap.

Since I need a job that lets me work from home, I just started reading anything and everything I could to learn more about the biz. While I'm not making any real money from affiliate sales just yet, my design skills have opened a door into the adult entertainment biz, and it's giving me the means to support myself at this point. :francais:

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Originally Posted by bregot

Well, It wasn't me who found the job, but the job who found me! Really!

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I want to hear this story, I've seen your work. :)

Dzinerbear

I've always associated myself with online communications and porn since a very early age. I got my first computer in 1984 - an Atari 1200XL with a 300 baud modem. What did I use more then anything with it? The modem of course! I was up all night calling the BBS's around Dallas/Ft Worth. Now this led into a three year interlude with phone phreaking and computer hacking... imagine a gay Matthew Broderick from War Games, except I didn't have Ally Sheedy around...... my buddies were all guys and we went a lot father in bed the Matthew and Ally ever did in that flick.

In college I tried to move myself from technology, and explore other areas. I took classes in German, Economics and Philosophy. But the pull of geekdom prevailed, and soon I was working at Radio Shack. Then selling computers for Dell. In 1996 I sold my Dell stock to start something I always wanted to do --- run a multiline BBS. This idea tanked, but I was able to use O'Reilly books and software to run a web server and basic ISP. I used my dell employee discount to buy Windows NT 3.51 for a hundred bucks, and I taught myself how to run it.

So with my then boyfriend we hosted sites and did graphics / website design. In 1997 it occured to me that running my own content website would be interesting and potentially lucrative. So sitting with my family that Thanksgiving I pitched an idea to my mother - take all my grandma's recipes and put them online. Even if we didn't make a dime, it would be fun to promote a family legacy.

Well it took some time, but I cut my teeth on many of the basics of running your own website as a business. So how did I get into porn? Well my boyfriend and I broke up in 2000, and by 2001 I had been living like a pauper for years, taking all the money I got and pouring it all right back into my apartment rent and ISP bills (a T1 into my apt).

In 2002 everything began clicking. I noticed on Texas Cooking that if I discussed a certain cookbook or book about Texas, people would buy it through my Amazon links. So I started Frisky Fans and did the same thing with a subject I knew exteremly well --- gay porn movies.

Well in 2003 both sites finally started making some real money. I also have added several other sites on various subjects which happen to interest me. If I wasn't personally interested in the subject, I won't mess with it. So today of my eight sites, I just have one porn site.

I don't know about you guys, but I can say that none of it was easy. However after all this time, after two apartment evictions and living lean I actually have my own business. I work for myself, and I work pretty much when I want. Last year I was able to do things like buy a car, and travel to Phoenix, Hollywood and Vegas to meet so many nice people.

And I work with things that I enjoy talking about. Also it is interesting because almost everyone I know really now doesn't understand my job. It's funny. If I tell them I run a porn site, they think I film models or run a cam. If I tell them I run a cooking website, they think I sell recipes. Saying that I make money from affiliate programs is like speaking in Swahili. It takes a lot of explaining, and I can tell from the look on their face that even after trying they don't really follow.

I guess I first learned back in 1984 that it is fun being enigmatic.

Steve

Well, I was at work one day and overheard a customer telling another customer that he runs a porn site. Naturaly that got my attention. I start asking him questions, I had talked to him several times before and he seemed pretty cool. I learned a little about what he was doing, which, looking back is a bad idea. He was spamming AOL chat rooms. At this time, I had no idea how much you could make and he told me he was making about $150-200 a day. At first I thought that was how you do it. I really never talked anymore to him, and by this time I found out about YNOT, and other boards. Then after reading it seems like millions of posts, I realize there is a way to make money but it takes a well thought out plan and some experience. I lurked on many boards and one night I see "turnkey". I thought like everybody does when they dont know what it takes to make it. I thought this is perfect for me. I look around and I see somebody asking about Hammer's Porn site Pros. That ended up being Mamakty. I decide that is the route I am gonna go, cuz he's always on the boards, knows what he's talking about, and seems to be helping everybody. A site built by his company has got to be the way to go right? I'm not saying anything bad about Hammer and his company because I have read posts from people who have had a site up for a year and not made anything. I am making money at least but not to the extent that I can be. I know that I paid to much for my site, but that is ok. I see the work out there that you guys have to do to be succesful. I am just floating along, learning as I go, and trying to make a buck. Oh and by the way- GREAT BOARD!!!!!

When I got out of the service and moved back to the Middle East, I got a job at the US embassy where I lived. There was one computer in the records room of my agency's offices that had a satellite internet connection. That was the first time I ever got online, apart from using intranet e-mail and services on base while in the service.

I remember being fascinated by the net and sort of made it part of my job to fiddle about with it there at the embassy. In fact, I even remember using the GI computer on Uncle Sam's dime to peek at the Nifty Erotic Stories Archives a couple times hehe. *blush* But the realization of how unwise a thing that was to do on the GI machine at the embassy quickly made that a thing of the past.

I left my job at the embassy to work at the American University there, where I was really the only person who'd fiddled about with the internet and so convinced them to give me a job updating and modifying their library records (all hardcopy), develop an intranet database and records system, as well as cataloging system for all the books in the library. By that point I was hooked on the theory of the inter and intranet. When I moved to the US to attend college I spent more time fiddling about on the web than I did going to class. I was learning a great deal, though my grades didn't quite reflect it. I spent countless hours doing anything I could do online, from chatting with people and coming out of the closet to internet chatbuddies and looking at porn and having cybersex and making online friends and having e-boyfriends and having it be a huge part of my "sexual awakening", so to speak. But I also did geekier things like study Yahoo and Google. I was fascinated by how they chose to list the sites they did for certain search terms in the orders they did. I'd be up until the wee hours of the morning studying websites and trying to decipher why they ranked as they did.

The first time I got paid to do anything internet related is when a security firm I worked for asked me to use the internet to gather information on persons of interest for threat assessment purposes. Celebrity stalkers and what not. And I found that Google and Yahoo alone could grant me more information about these people than an army of PI background investigators. The company appreciated that as well, and this all thankfully paid for my AOL account (this was in the days before unlimited access, when you paid for AOL by the minute).

A short time later, I approached a web developer friend of mine asking if I could experiment with some of his sites to see if I could get them higher rankings in the search engines. He got his clients to agree to let me fiddle about with em, and I was extremely successful at it. By this point I'd decided a career online was where I wanted to be. I started up an SEO firm that did well and is still around today - in fact one of the top SEO firms in the world - in partnership with this web developer friend. Our client list included AT&T, Microsoft, Dell, and even Inktomi had us develop aspects of their search marketing business. As crazy as it sounds, the church of sc**ientol**ogy took over my partner's half of that company when he joined them and became all gungho about his newfound "religion", signing over his entire life to them just about. I got the hell out when that happened, going to work for various mainstream corporations and startups in their marketing depts. It all became an incredibly frustrating experience, though, as the bubble was bursting and the internet was full of poor business plans and ventures doomed to failure. I couldn't take working for these kinds of operations, so went back to doing stuff on my own. Not to mention I was extremely bitter and frustrated about what had happened to my old company and so was rather incompetent and ineffective as an employee by them. I wasn't able to deal with certain aspects of traditional, brick and mortar business imposed upon me by my employers.

A couple years ago a guy I was seeing at the time came home with a C*ybersocket magazine, pointing out a job ad he saw in the back that he thought I'd be interested in. "Web Marketing Expert" for Bionic Pixels. BP didn't have a marketing dept. yet and so I saw being able to start it from the ground up and run it myself with freedom and carte blanche as a great opportunity. I applied and got the job. Most of BPs clients were adult companies. And so after awhile focusing entirely on being an outsourced specialist for these clients through BP, I started up some original ventures through it. Figure why only be an outsourced expert when there's more money to be made runnin' your own stuff? Adult seemed the logical way to go as we had the connections and know-how in that arena already and had proven ourselves good at it.

And so, here I am. Able to continue to provide outsourced services to clients whose products I like (companies like Bel Ami and Eurocreme and BoyFunk and CorbinFisher that I think are insanely hot and enjoy working with a great deal) while at the same time running 6 of our own sites, both free and pay. And I'm havin a blast. There's still a "wild west" aspect of the industry and the job is both informal and intense - two things I like. Tried and true aspects of traditional business that I personally respect and appreciate apply to this industry and this kind of work, while likewise there is still a lot of new territory to be forged, experiments to be undertaken, and new things to do. I love that. And so see myself staying awhile :D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Dzinerbear

I want to hear this story, I've seen your work. :)
Dzinerbear

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I'm taking photos for 20 years, I've got my digital camera for almost 5. Those days (in y2k) it was really something: Casio QV 3000 (3 Mpix). Now Canon G5.

I started doing some X-rated sessions with my friends, just for fun. I became popular among them. Then came the fame. One of my friends was very interested in digital photography and we shot ca. 2500 pics in just four days!

He was so pleased with the results, that he showed it to his friend, a guy who owned a gay site. He was at once proposed to sell the set to this gallery. As the boy wanted to have his naked photos, but hestitated to put it in the net, he refused. Then the owner of the website asked him to (at least) contact with me, and this is how it started.

I remember I could not sleep that night... I was so excited that I would do the thing more officially. And what's more I was to discuss it with the owner on the very next day.

I remember I could not sleep also the day after... Once again I was very excited! This time it was caused by the first commercial session on the following day.

And guess what?! The third night in a row was sleepless either! I shoot the set and it was published on the same night. It was the first time ever, when my material was in the internet! I can't recall how many times I pressed F5 to refresh the counters.

Wanna see the set? Clik here:
Januszek
(I would like to acknowledge BoyLantis, who let me keep this set)
Wanna see the site? Here it is:
Gejowo.pl
(Now it is probably one of the biggest gay service in my country. Sorry - it is in Polish)
And now - come and see my private website!
Bregot.com
(There are five subpages in the gallery)

Good story, bregot.

Have you ever gotten in front of the camera?

Dzinerbear

I was making chicken. It was dark. I met a stranger.

I started the next week.

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Originally Posted by Jasun

I was making chicken. It was dark. I met a stranger.

I started the next week.

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HAHA! You are charming the HELL out of me today. :swoon:

I started out and continue to own/operate/produce mainstream type sites. One day I decided to do a dating info site....

I discovered that when you put the words "gay" and "dating" together you come up with "adult" in many peoples eyes. So...I've slowly been leaning that way ever since.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Dzinerbear

Have you ever gotten in front of the camera?
Dzinerbear

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There's a proverb in PL, saying "shoemaker walks without shoes". For years I had very few occasions to have my own photo session, but happily my friends came to my city and made me some pics this December. Wanna see?

honestly.. i dont remember, i just know that my first check was sent by adultbouncer in january 2002.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by bregot

There's a proverb in PL, saying "shoemaker walks without shoes". For years I had very few occasions to have my own photo session, but happily my friends came to my city and made me some pics this December. Wanna see?

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Of course, I wanna see. I've been talking to you long enough, it'd be nice to see what you look like. :)

Dzinerbear

My current Partner started me off,
I had just moved in next to him, I sort of knew him cause we went to same school, he needed help with submiting galleries and 4 years went by and Voila!

I've been online since I was a kid. My first computer was a 286 that included a 2400 baud modem and a Prodigy signup kit. From that point on, I was really destined to be online.

I worked for AOL for about 7 years. (FYI, to squash a little of the public opinion, they really do have smart people working for them. Don't lump everyone with the call center script-readers.) But anyway, I started to get a little tired of LOWER management egos, and realized how underpaid remote employees were compared to their "internal" counterparts.

I decided to look around to see what else I could do online for some extra cash. Heck knows I like porn, but it didn't strike me as an option until I noticed one of my favorite sites was a partner to a bigger network. I really liked the service they offered, and went to check it out. The signup was easy. I think I was up and running in a week.

As it turns out, my division was part of the company's last layoff. So I suddenly have more time and determination to make it work as best it can. :joker:

Cliff Notes!:)...Mom Ran A Female Strip Club ( Probably Why I Went Gay!:), Learned To Use A Camera , Took Pitures Of Jocks In High School "In & Out" Of Uniform! , Joined The Navy Took Pictures Of Military Personel "In & Out" Of Uniform! , Opened A Studio For Family Portraits..."Starved"! , Returned To "Nude-Photography" , Made Films! , Went Through 3 Expensive Relationships , "The Apple" Computer Emerged! , I Went Digital , I Turned 40 Last November And Stopped Performing As A Model ( Stop Laughing!:) , I Now Work "Behind" The Camera Making "Exclusive/Custom" Photo/Film Sets , I Will Probably Die Holding A Camera...But Ohh!... What A Way To Go!:)

Sincerely ~ ..."You've Got A Longer Way To Go Baby"...:)

I actually started of in FRONT of the camera. I had modelled for some fetish magazines like Bound and Gagged 9yes I was naked and tied up, AND in heaven!) I posed for a free website called Capturedguys.com tied up in my old high school wrestling uniform, and we saw that we were getting a lot of hits. We experimented with making that site a pay site, and the rest is history.

And years later I still find pics of me bound in that singlet all over cyberspace. . .!



Dart

Quote:

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Originally Posted by Jasun

I was making chicken. It was dark. I met a stranger.

I started the next week.

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Or was it makin' A chicken? :huh:

I started off showing off online as an exhibistionist (this was 1996) and then found a site that was charging guys to watch...DUH...I signed up with an AVS (AdultCheck) and started to make money showing off...Adult Check offered a Gold program so I switched and started maked INSANE MONEY ($20000.00) a month! So that's it...I had a retail job selling computers and saw an opportunity for more...

Moved on to Paysites and have never looked back!!