Quote Originally Posted by maxpower View Post
You guys really work in office building someplace with ties on, office plants, baseball teams, 401k, and all that? I would be worried about supporting all that on a web-site, even one as good as yours. (snip)
I did not really think their was enough money in this to grow so big. Gay Corporate Porn? :signhere:
Smart business owners, regardless of whether they are running a multinational pharmaceutical giant or a gay porn company, are always looking ahead, anticipating risks and changes in the business, and doing their best to mitigate the risks and diversify their revenue streams.

I've always viewed the adult online business as volatile.

As an industry, the online adult companies are better than 60% reliant on one single entity, the Visa cardmember association. Mastercard, Discover, and the smaller players represent a small chunk of the total processing volume, and I believe that AmEx prohibits porn entirely. What this means is if Visa suddenly decided to stop processing for adult -- which they could definitely do if they so desired -- revenues from adult websites would almost vanish overnight.

Likewise, if the two major banks who are underlying processors for Epoch and CCBill suddenly stopped processing adult (as many others have) or, even more likely, were acquired by Chase or First Data, both of whom prohibit porn, most everyone in the industry would be shit out of luck.

On the physical product side, downloadable DVDs will most likely marginalize the sales of physical product within a few years.

So... a smart business owner is aware of those things, and constantly is looking for strategies to minimize their risk, or at least spread it around by diversifying their revenue streams into related areas.

I don't think that it's wise for a high-revenue company in any field to limit their revenue streams to one form of business; diversification is key. So in that way, maybe Max is right that being *just* a corporate porn company is on the risky side. But I do believe there are ways to limit that risk.