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How To Make Money Online
mrsalty writes: "Salon is running an interview with ex-dotcommer Philip Brandes. For a modest fee ($140 US) Brandes will teach you the secret of making money in the skin trade.
" Ah, a nice respectable trade -- every parent's dream for their business-school dropout child.
Withholding serves other purposes as well:
On a different note, yes, if you are self employed you only have to pay taxes once a year (and you don't have withholdings), but in most cases you will probably want to pay "estimated taxes" quarterly in order to avoid a penalty in April (around 9%, I think).
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Free P2P Backup, Windows & Linux
The first question to anyone who is "selling" a get rich scheme is "If it works so well why the hell are you not off doing that?" The only benefit I have ever noticed to the get rich schemes is that it seems more possible to make money selling "how to get rich" schemes than one can make of the actual scheme.
The second question is "How saturated is the market?" In general a market will saturate. Here is a question for slashdot, Do you think the skintrade will ever saturate?
Click here for an online porn staffing company like HotJobs. Fine then don't send me a dollar cheap basta...
Want Root?
back in the day, males made way more money than females, i wonder if that's still true and why.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
Treatment, not tyranny. End the drug war and free our American POWs.
See my user info for links.
When I read that part of the article I had fond memories of my school days. .10 each or $2 a pack. Name Brand: .25 each or $4 a pack. I didn't start smoking until 3 years after I graduated because a dealer doesn't make money if they sample the merchandise.
Middle school: go downtown to the newspaper stands in front of the court house and put a dollar in and get a fist full of the swingers papers. Sell them for $2 each to suburban peers.
High school: I would sell 2 cartons of cigs a day. GPC/Basic:
Collage: Go to the major Magic the Gathering (Tragic the Addiction) tournaments and by rare cards for cheap and then sell them to suburban peers at "book" rate. Not dishonest or illegal but very profitable.
Now I am all grown up and have a much better moral code. Ah to be young and non-prosecutable and without a conscious again.
Spell checked for your sanity.
Ascii artist &
His proposal: Entice people in with the prospect of quick and easy gratification and then charge them $1000.
On of you is in tune with the porn industry. I'm guessing it's him.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
You might be required to calculate your taxes on a quarterly basis, depending on how you set up your financial situation with your state's business laws, and you may choose to set aside a portion of your weekly pay in a separate account for taxes (not a bad idea, and you can give yourself a "refund" at the end of the year after calculating your allowable deductions), but there is no "withholding" as you are used to with a regular weekly/biweekly/semi-monthly/monthly paycheck.
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jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
Basically, if I had a surefire way to get rich, I'd sure not share it because the last thing I'd want is competition keeping me from cashing in.
Slashdot is progressive enough in other areas, so why is it that this article seems to be slanted against porn site operators? Why the condescending "Oh, that's a nice field to be working in" attitude? There is nothing wrong with porn. A healthy sex drive is exactly that -- healthy. Oh, sure .. some people abuse pornography, but there are plenty of people who abuse alcohol and tobacco and guns and cars, too. Shouldn't the self-proclaimed moralists go after those things as well?
The type of mindset that is espoused by the anti-porn crusaders is actually a dangerous one. For an example of this idea taken to its logical extreme, look at the Middle Ages. During this time it was considered a "sin" to expose the body -- even to one's self. The result? Bathing and basic hygiene were virtually nonexistant. It was attitudes like this that led to the spread of the Black Plague and other diseases that decimated Europe.
I've got some advice for the anti-porn types. Are you sitting down? Here it is: Don't look at porn! If you hate porn, and those involved in the industry, fine. Hate away. Knock yourself out. But stop trying to run the lives of mature adults who are thinking for themselves. If you want to embark on your anti-porn fight, go ahead. Just remember that attitudes like this have caused billions of deaths over the course of human history. That these attitudes still exist in the year 2001 is a source of endless amazement to me.
"We all say so, so it must be true!"
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
Hmmm, pitiful lack of ethics and total disregard for academic knowledge. A CEO with potential.
"Anonymous Coward" is for whistleblowers, not unpopular opinions.
That's It! It's time for Open Source p0rn. We'll never take over the Desktop of the typical computer user without it.
Who's up to starting a project for GPL'd thumbnail gallery of Fake Transvestite BSD'ers, or maybe a BSD Licensed repository of retouched Commie FSF folks on Centerfold bodies?
Maybe A Kp0rn vs GTKsmut package battle is just what we need to heat up the old interface wars.
Maybe a category of our own on FreshMeat...
If this guy can make money off of it anyone can. This is just what we need to prove to the American Business community that Free Open Source smut can mix with the Commercial version without conflict.
It's a call to arms! Who's with me?
Everyone seems to think that running a porn website is the easiest job in the world - I am here to tell you it is *far, far* more complicated than you imagine. Much of this complication stems from the very business itself.
Any nimrod can set up a picture viewer. It's a little more complicated than that, but essentially your average script kiddie can get the physical site up. The problems being when you start trying to *take credit cards*.
There are a number of online credit card processing companies, but very, very few that are really willing to take on "adult sites" due to the rampant CC fraud and chargeback problems.
Most processors will accept up to 10% chargebacks from "normal" sites, like say your Amazon.coms and whatnot. For those that don't know, a "chargeback" is the reversal of a CC charge, instigated by the card holder or the CC company itself. For example, if Joe Sixpack sees a charge on his card, he'll call the CC company and go "I didn't make that!" and the CC company will reverse it. This is a chargeback. The processor is responsible for these costs.
The CC companies, like Visa, will allow a certain amount of this to take place before cutting off the middleman processor. It is the processor's job to maintain this ratio.
However, because of the business of adult content, and the chargeback issues, adult sites are usually only allowed a maximum of 1% chargebacks before being "cut off" by a processor. 1% is not a lot, only 1 in 100. It is very, very easy to get cut off by a processor because of this.
What we do is rotate processors, sending one client to one and another to a different processor, hoping to spread the chargebacks across several processors. Even still, we lose a processor about once every few months.
So, the process of managing processors, and the customer service issues with that, plus filtering out known deadbeats, is a major issue - let alone user management. It is *not* easy.
Next, you have the issue of hacking. Since porn is "dirty", no one feels bad about attempting to steal it. That means we are *constantly* under attack from people attempting to hack in, or who share passwords, or attempt to guess passwords - all kinds of attacks on our system. The system we use to filter out these people is all custom-written C code, apache modules, perl, and firewall configs, and is *not simple*.
Bandwidth is not cheap. Our bandwidth costs for our few sites is on average about $7,500 a month. On top of that, the systems required to pump out those dirty pictures rivals that of the national ISPs I've managed. The layers of servers, cache machines, firewalls, traffic shapers, etc. is *not simple*.
After all that is said and done, the final issue is competition - this is a cut-throat business, with *millions* of sites competing for eyeballs. Making your site stand out in that is a full time job.
When people ask me how to get into online porn, I tell them, "don't. It's too late." They think it's as easy as throwing up a page and waiting for the cash to roll in - it ain't. Trust me.
Ok. I'm going to spill all his secrets. This is how you start and operate your very own fly by night porn site. Take notes, there will be a quiz sometime maybe.
First, you need something to offer on your porn site. Most porn sites involve to some degree pictures of naked women (there are exceptions, I know). There are various ways to accomplish this. You can buy yourself a camera, go up to random women and offer them a wad of cash to take their clothes off, and repeat until you find one that doesn't slap you and run away screaming. This is your porn star.
Take a bunch of pictures of her and now you have content. But wait.. This takes too much work, and besides, it will actually COST YOU MONEY!!! We wouldn't want to actually invest anything in this. The 4 hours you're going to spend setting it up and all that time you're going to spend depositing money in the bank is going to take too much of your time, spending extra money on it just seems like a waste.
Thankfully, there is no need. Just go to Usenet. There is a treasure trove of prescanned pictures available in every variety you would ever need. Of course, most of these pictures are copyrighted, but thats not your problem. You're here to make money in the porn industry, and don't let laws, morals, ethics, or your standing in the community slow you down. Simply stea... err.. aquire as many pictures as you think you will need. Now its time to set up your web page!!!
You can invest in a server at a porn friendly ISP, pay a premium for bandwidth because they know you will have the most popular site they host (except for all the other porn sites). Pay through the nose and watch the orders trickle in...
WAIT!!! What am I saying!! No.. don't bother spending money on that expensive crap. Do what all the other thriving porn sites do. USE GEOCITIES!! Don't mind any disclaimers you see that prohibit exactly your site. This is not your concern. You're here to make money. Don't let guilt of abusing a free service get in the way!
Now you've got a place for your site, and you've uploaded all your pictures. Now you need a flashy front page. Exactly the page that no man with properly functioning anatomy will be able to look away from. This means you need LOTS of BIG WORDS IN CAPS that declare that you are offering not just any regular old porn, but the most nasty wet obscene and most likely illegal porn that has ever existed. And its only available on your site!
Make sure you mention that there are hot teen bitches that want you now, and other phrases that nobody can possibly refuse. All over this front page, you need lots of pictures of exciting beautiful girls (that you walked out on the street and took pictures of) and claim that all of them are naked inside. It doesn't matter if they're not, by the time the suckers find out, YOU WILL ALREADY HAVE THEIR MONEY! Of course, you don't want any children in your nasty porn site, so you better get one of their age verification passwords, or two or three of them just to be on the safe side, since this is a REALLY nasty site. Of course, unknown to the 3 new people that joined the internet this week, age verification systems are just a kickback scheme and do nothing to actually prevent minors, but thats not really your concern. You've done your part.
Now, while your site is the very best there ever was, its possible that you might not appeal to absolutely everyone. For this reason, you should make several front pages, each with a slightly different theme. Just in case some people enjoy men in leather rather than hot teen bitches. No matter. Simply set up a javascript function so when they close the window, it will automatically bring up the next page. I mean, these people intentionally went to your porn site, they're gonna get some porn, no matter what. We'll just keep rotating pages until they find one that they like.
And last but not least, you'll need visitors. The best and least expensive way to do this is sending email to everyone on the internet telling them all about it. People want you to do this. They all want to get into your porn site, I mean... who wouldn't? They've just been unfortunate enough not to hear about it yet, and most of them will be extremely happy you dropped them a short 100k email to tell them about it. A few of these people might send you email back telling you to remove them from your list. Of course, they're just probably doing that because their wife or girlfriend was hovering over them and made them write it. Secretly they want to get into your site, so you might as well send them more email so they'll be able to catch it the second time around. Don't forget to post about your site in every newsgroup on usenet too, and on web page forums, and anywhere else you can find. Just make sure you don't spend any actual money on it. That would cut into your profits, and we wouldn't want that.
Ok. Thats it. You now have a fully functional high volume popular porn site. I don't think I left anything out, but if I did, I'm sure its not important. That'll be $140. Cash please.
-Restil
:)
Play with my webcams and lights here
We're just saying that we're sick and tired of having to also keep on reassuring you that we think you're a swell guy for doing so. In actual fact, we think you're a little bit of a bore (like the guy who spends all his time with his stamp collection), and that you tend to make some fairly silly political arguments. We also think that your industry is not "nice", since it involves the transformation of something which is generally at its best when performed as a mutual, co-operative act into a solitary, commercial transaction. But we usually don't like to say so.
The thing is, if you don't like criticism of pornography (or masturbation thereto), as you say, Don't read it! We have no problem not looking at pornography; we're not obsessed (you're confusing us with you). But you don't seem to be able to exist without constant reassurance that you don't need to be ashamed of anything. And that's becoming a little bit tiresome for us to provide. From now on, you're on your own. Whether you feel ashamed or not of your habit is entirely your own decision, and you can no longer count on us to tell you that porn is A-OK. Sorry and all that, but it's tough love.
Wanker.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
Build a content-management system geared towards porography with an e-commerce engine, graphics-rendering system, tracking system, etc. Once the software is in place, charge for the class as this fellow is doing and also have higher-end classes for customization of the backend (Interwoven & Vignette rack in alot of bucks doing this). One could also then hire out consultants for customization which the less tech-savy would need (such as WebCrossings does).
Another route would be to set up an ASP solution by investing in the hardware and "hosting" multiple porn sites under common engines. One could take a cut of the proceeds and also charge monthly fees for hosting & cc-processing.
Pretty sad that these ideas would work where it's a flop under other businesses, eh?
"...and generally behaved in a manner one can only describe as despicable." - February 27 2001, Michael Sims