Hey everyone, Got a question.
When I was in the biz 2001 - 2007 there was big money in pay sites. Affiliate programs were a big deal and everyone made money. Solo girls did well too. There was a reason to risk being shunned by your neighbors and embarrassing your parents, LOL. Cash Money. And lots of it.
Then I went into more mainstream businesses and sat on the sidelines while tube sites made a splash along with their controversy and then came the onslaught of the penis enlargement pills. I kinda drifted away from GFY and all my good friends in the industry because it didn't pay to go to conventions anymore. Now I mostly build iPhone & Android apps, so i have no interaction with what's hot or not, but I do miss the industry and will always hold a fondness for what it was.
So...the big question is, is there any real money in porn? Is this little more than a hobby unless you are a large conglomerate? a micro-version of retail and manufacturing in America, where all the thriving independent businesses have been gobbled up into a handful of large cold corporations?
I took a look around and it seems to me that all pay sites look basically the same now. In the past, guys put up sites about the weird shit they were into personally. Their own perverted minds fueled the creativity and you had a sense of excitement on these sites and yet a little darkness too. Now, they seem glossed over and soulless like Coca cola's version of Santa Claus. They are visually stunning but that "darkness" is missing. It's not something you can point out, it's just a little twist that a corporation sub-committee cannot duplicate. Probably two or three pay sites (or groups of sites) still have juice, like Duke's FacialAbuse.com or Dirty "D"'s stuff at thestall.com...
I also looked up amateur web girls and what do I see? the same girls from ten years ago...amazingly they haven't aged much because they are mostly recycling the same content they shot years ago. If it is even them who own the site now. It blows my mind that a new generation of amateur girls have not risen up, but I must come to one conclusion, it just must not pay the bills anymore.
So where is the money being made? and are the individual web masters completely snuffed out at this point? I wonder what the industry is worth as a dollar amount and as a percentage of our GNP because it was huge just 5 or 6 years ago.
I'd love to hear your 2 cents.
-Ray Vega