Thinking of starting an old fashioned link list

[Ironhorse]

I've been out of adult industry for some years and nursing the idea of a return since 2019, trying to get as much info about the changes from this board and some private convos with folks I used to know and do business with. There have been many changes in the industry, and not for the better, in trying to monetize running your own show but I've landed on an old fashioned idea of a link list as a starting point.

I have many tangential future projects that I am working on and an organic link list could be a good funnel to maximize exposure both to the usual porn surfers and also industry insiders. As a veteran web designer with decades of experience I can minimize overhead from that perspective alone while having a place to highlight my work for the occasional design job that might come my way. I am also a decent illustration artist and story writer, and have some plans to produce cartoon/illustration content in the future so this would also be a vehicle. Also shooting my own content was the initial drive that got me into porn to begin with back in 1998 so I haven't given up on that idea.

This would be more of a portal linking the gems I find surfing porn daily, my own content as I produce it, a blog/review section, maybe run a custom tube script for the niches that appeal to me, and of course keeping up to date with industry norms as I familiarize myself with the industry pulse.

The niches would be some traditional type porn (video) but also blog reviews for erotic illustration and cartoons with some affiliate program, for example review an adult graphic novel with links to Amazon or similar type monetization. There are many ways to funnel this.

Traffic of course is the eternal problem and it seems much tougher to generate quality traffic these days. The hope would be to rely on bookmark followers for folks that have similar interests and the $ to spend on reliable recommendations. I was decent at generating SE traffic back in the day but everything has changed so that is most definitely the crucial obstacles everyone in the industry faces. But since it's a two pronged approach to also reach adult industry for custom content and services and the very low relative overhead to run something like this, I feel it's a good approach.

Anyway I'm mostly brainstorming a new idea for a new year. I'm comfortable with the idea it may take a good while to get any attention to a site like this but it's manageable as a side gig on my part. Once I set it up it's basically not really a job to keep a running content update for something I already do almost daily - surf porn and related content and compile it into a portal.

Any thoughts? Comments? I appreciate any feedback.

[Publisher Bucks]

No reason not to, we do something similar, add everything we make into a central SQL database, categorize it and feed it through several sites we own to seed 'new' links, products, etc...

[Huggles]

Originally Posted by Ironhorse

Traffic of course is the eternal problem and it seems much tougher to generate quality traffic these days.

I built a sweet system to display videos in an almost never-ending scroller where the movies would play on-screen as the user sat back and let the screen scroll by. It worked great on mobile and desktop. If you moused-over the movies playing, the webm movie would pause and if you clicked, it would take you to the full preview movie at that exact time in the video, and then present a banner / link to sign up. The problem is, since it was all in java and lightweight, that there was 0 SEO on the page.

https://sicklovestudios.com/samples/tubekiller.mp4

After reading a ton of sources on SEO, BlackHatWorld, and other places, it became clear to me that the only way you can start a site in 2024 and actually make it, is if you buy a ton of links like The Porn Dude. You need everyone to link to you, and to do that, you need to pay!

If you had 100k sitting around and you could buy a ton of links, get pornstars to talk about your site on social media, and become memeable like OnlyFans or PornHub, then yeah, you could be the next porn site.

Truth is, the porn world SEO is pretty much locked down. Have you searched Google lately for anything? It is basically useless as every result is PornHub, Xhamster, or Xvideos. The Porn Dude is up there too, but the same sites pop up constantly and none of them really "innovate" how porn is displayed. My system was pretty cool and I had plans to have it so the most paused and clicked-on clips would automatically be put into a "top 100 clips" page that would dynamically update along with "most shared" and other stuff. Using Java, webm and webp, I built a super cool engine and I had a lot of plans for how you could endlessly scroll in 360 degrees on the page, and the engine would count how many seconds you spend watching certain genres and pornstars and then it would weight those videos/stars when you scrolled further until your browsing habits changed depending on what you clicked and what you watched the longest. Lots of cool stuff you can do in Java with overlays. The page loaded the movies in JSON and it was easy to swap out movies, unload and load them from memory, pause and replay cached movies when they move in and out of the view port.

I gave up on it because there was no way to actually get traffic. I would have to buy a ton of links and traffic and I have no money, so there's no way to innovate. Why bother innovating when innovation has no value in the system?

Not to rain on your parade, but unless you're willing to buy a ton of links and really, really work hard on your brand, there is pretty much no way to build a site worth your time in 2025. You could make more money getting a job at McDonald's and then pumping your money into BitCoin than to build a link list.

Anyone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but during 2023 I was working on my site and while it was so much fun to learn basic coding in Ruby and JS to get the site up and working properly, the fact that search engines couldn't even see anything on my page, my videos weren't indexed, and there was no way to get traffic, I figured there was no point to even trying to innovate if search engines aren't designed to see innovative sites. Search engines are designed to reward the most linked sites and the sites with authority, so if you want traffic to your link list, you're going to have to buy a ton of links.

Look at The Porn Dude's site, there's nothing interesting or innovative about it, but he has tons of sites linking him and comes up first in Google for many searches. The only way you can compete with that in 2025 is to buy your own links, but then you're paying up front to build traffic... might as well YOLO that money into crypto as it has a higher chance of making money.

I'd have to look deeper, but I made a video showing the automatic scrolling and other features, but I may have deleted them after I gave up when I couldn't get 10 hits a day from Google no matter what I did, haha. So I just wrote my 3rd book that nobody read or bought, then I made misery music videos about the homelessness and crime plaguing my hometown which made 0 money and right as I hit 1000 followers and 5 million impressions in 3 months on Twitter for monetization, I got banned. Despite all of my talents and brains, the only money I made was doing gig labour for minimum wage for most of 2024, which lead to getting a hernia that I now need surgery for and I can't even do labour until it's fixed.

I mean, you might have luck building a link list, but I think you'd probably make more money in a month doing a single shift at McDonald's.

Originally Posted by Ironhorse

for example review an adult graphic novel with links to Amazon or similar type monetization.

Romantasy books where werewolf billionaires rape women and murder competition, "alpha novels" as they are called, is what is selling in the literary world.



Personally, being a writer and artist myself, I can't sell out and produce this utter slop, but if you wanted to make money online quick, you should read a couple of these books and get the general pace / themes of them, then get AI to crank out a book a day (easy as long as you pay the $20 unlimited ChatGPT fee.) and then use stock photos or AI to generate covers. Slap it together with themes of hardcore rape, beast sex, incest and murder and the most graphic sex scenes and I'm sure if you can crank out a book a day, you could find success selling this dreck.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/spicy...tion-1.7398541

Picking a female pen name is critical as women are much more likely to buy smut books written by women:



This shit is pure slop but it makes female authors millionaires, and unlike porn which will take a ton of work, time, and money, you could get AI to throw books like this together in a day.



Take the time to read some of these books, the writing is grade 7 level and you can copy and paste chapters of books like this directly into ChatGPT and get it to re-write each chapter with different characters and maybe a different sport, like Basketball, and you can make it a poly, kink, "age is just a number" novel with all sorts of hints of perverse shit and I bet TikTok will eat it up. BookTok, as it is called, you could make AI videos AI voiceovers reading the smut and I bet you'd get sales and readers. I can't bring myself to create such total fucking slop, but if a bro from GFY did it and found money from it, I'd be happy!

Also, the start up for this would pretty much just be the costs of ChatGPT, a few books to read and understand what bitches are flicking their bean to, and then however much effort you want to put into your cover.



One key to remember about the time we are living in is that the concept of "authenticity" doesn't matter at all. If you can trick people into thinking you're a woman writing smut novels, people will eat this shit up. You can even have an AI avatar and update your socials as a completely fake person and nobody will be the wiser. Dating, birth rates, socializing... they have all collapsed greatly, and if you want to capitalize on it, women are buying these books like crazy. The increase in sales over the last few years is wild.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/artic...got-so-popular

[mrmister]

Link list will cost a fortune to rank well with any volume. Well written content just won't cut it I'm afraid. If anyone can show me a linklist with well written content which ranks well from content alone I will eat my hat

[Freedom6995]

shit or get off the pot

[Huggles]

Originally Posted by mrmister

Link list will cost a fortune to rank well with any volume. Well written content just won't cut it I'm afraid. If anyone can show me a linklist with well written content which ranks well from content alone I will eat my hat

Search engines are pretty much useless these days, for example, if you have car issues and you need answers, Google is fucking useless. You're better served going to old school php forums like GFY and manually searching.

If you have an issue with a 2.4 Dodge Stratus misfire, for example, Google serves you results first from companies looking to profit from your issue rather than sources of information that provide the answers for free.

[Huggles]

Case in point for search engine uselessness:

[O MARINA]

Back to the basics

[Ironhorse]

Originally Posted by Freedom6995

shit or get off the pot

Got your attention did I not? This was ultimately the point of the post. I did also get a few private messages with folks interested in working with me.

Thanks everyone for all the feedback, it's very valuable although most comments are just reinforcing what I already know. However my intention is not to create a link list in the traditional sense as a sole revenue generator but primarily as a platform to highlight my skill as a designer and developer, promote my adult art and cartoons, and a vehicle to transition back from corporate mainstream design into the adult market.

I still make a living in mainstream software design and development but the corporate grind gets to you after a while so I'm working multiple angles including illustration commissions and several YouTube channels. But I draw inspiration for my art from porn and other erotic artists and as a user I see an opportunity. The intended audience is very different than your typical porn surfers although the formula is the same and starts with getting eyes on your product.

Huggles, thanks for the resources you provided, however when I said writing stories I meant Pulp Sex Comics like Milo Manara, Gotha, Jab etc. I have a very good story that I hope to eventually publish into a magazine format and that content will also have some appeal to adult industry providers either in the form of licensed content or custom art. Some examples below.

[NoWhErE]

Originally Posted by mrmister

Link list will cost a fortune to rank well with any volume. Well written content just won't cut it I'm afraid. If anyone can show me a linklist with well written content which ranks well from content alone I will eat my hat

Porndude
Mrporngeek
Etc

Want ketchup for that hat?

[Huggles]

Originally Posted by Ironhorse

Huggles, thanks for the resources you provided, however when I said writing stories I meant Pulp Sex Comics like Milo Manara, Gotha, Jab etc. I have a very good story that I hope to eventually publish into a magazine format and that content will also have some appeal to adult industry providers either in the form of licensed content or custom art. Some examples below.

That art looks really cool! Getting Warhol vibes.

Does any of that actually make money though?

The books I listed make millions, women's smut is blowing up because women have all been Taylor Swiftified to believe in fairy tales that don't exist, and when reality hits them in life, they pickup smut books to escape into the fantasy. It is all connected to dating apps and how modern life has really disrupted socializing, sex, and dating in a negative way.

Indy bookstores report these smut books are sometimes 70%+ of their entire monthly sales...

[Huggles]

Originally Posted by NoWhErE

Porndude
Mrporngeek
Etc

Want ketchup for that hat?

Nobody can compete with those guys because they have like millions of backlinks and that's really all that matters. Google search is totally useless.

[Ironhorse]

Originally Posted by mrmister

Link list will cost a fortune to rank well with any volume. Well written content just won't cut it I'm afraid. If anyone can show me a linklist with well written content which ranks well from content alone I will eat my hat

A while back Huggles made a post about the lack of innovation in adult and this overreliance on Google is an example of that. Even in 1999 before Google we never settled on one search engine for traffic. It was understood that any one search engine performance was the result of cumulative efforts promoting on a variety of platforms. This has not changed and it will not change, it's the nature of the web to keep evolving.

With that said there are still a variety of means to get traffic to your site. Off the top of my head I can think of Reddit, YouTube, Twitter and an ever growing variety of online sources people flock to for their content.

[Ironhorse]

Originally Posted by Huggles

That art looks really cool! Getting Warhol vibes.

Does any of that actually make money though?

The books I listed make millions, women's smut is blowing up because women have all been Taylor Swiftified to believe in fairy tales that don't exist, and when reality hits them in life, they pickup smut books to escape into the fantasy. It is all connected to dating apps and how modern life has really disrupted socializing, sex, and dating in a negative way.

Indy bookstores report these smut books are sometimes 70%+ of their entire monthly sales...

To be honest I did at one point consider just making junk content like erotic books for women. But I know it's not a popular sentiment on this site, but I'm not just in it for the money. Art is often its own reward and if I decided to just prostitute myself with corny softporn literature I might as well walk over to McDonalds.

With that said my story is not for everyone. There will be nuns fisting, Fairy watersports, bondage and there's a scene with the sexy female protagonist having to acquire Minotaur sperm for a magic potion. It's wild =)

[Huggles]

Originally Posted by Ironhorse

Art is often its own reward and if I decided to just prostitute myself with corny softporn literature I might as well walk over to McDonalds.

[mrmister]

Originally Posted by NoWhErE

Porndude
Mrporngeek
Etc

Want ketchup for that hat?

I said content alone without backlinks

Theporndude has 15000 refering domains :D

[Ironhorse]

Originally Posted by mrmister

I said content alone without backlinks

Theporndude has 15000 refering domains :D

Ok that explains your comment. I never said this would be just one page and it's done. It's implied that for SEO or traffic in general to work it's best to have a large network of referring domains/pages, social media accounts etc. That's part of the plan.

[Huggles]

Originally Posted by Ironhorse

Ok that explains your comment. I never said this would be just one page and it's done. It's implied that for SEO or traffic in general to work it's best to have a large network of referring domains/pages, social media accounts etc. That's part of the plan.

I feel like search engines are becoming more and more useless. Like who even "surfs the web" anymore when only a few big sites seem to have any real content on them?

Dead internet theory seems pretty accurate. I often search for things like "Male Canadian independent writer" and "Indy male Canadian author" and all variations of this... I can find myself in the search results but not a single other male Canadian indy writer or author. Do these people not have websites? I'm obviously not the only indy Canadian writer... but why when I search with Google can I not find a SINGLE indy male writer's website in Canada? Not even one other than my own!

Shit's fucked, search engines are fucked, there is like no point to "surf the web" anymore.

Do you remember like 10+ years ago when you could type shit into a search engine and find tons of results and tons of info? Now search engines are fucking useless. ChatGPT will find results MUCH faster and MUCH better than fucking Google.

[DoubleDreams]

Originally Posted by Huggles

I often search for things like "Male Canadian independent writer" and "Indy male Canadian author" and all variations of this... I can find myself in the search results but not a single other male Canadian indy writer or author. Do these people not have websites? I'm obviously not the only indy Canadian writer... but why when I search with Google can I not find a SINGLE indy male writer's website in Canada? Not even one other than my own!

Have you tried grindr? You might find some there

[NoWhErE]

Originally Posted by mrmister

I said content alone without backlinks

Theporndude has 15000 refering domains :D

If you want to waste your time writing stuff nobody will read, then feel free to join the Huggles Publishing House.

If you want to get traffic, learn to market your content. One of the ways to do that is to acquire backlinks. Either you do that via content marketing or buying links is up to you.

[NoWhErE]

Originally Posted by Huggles

Nobody can compete with those guys because they have like millions of backlinks and that's really all that matters. Google search is totally useless.

This comment is EXACTLY why you will never succeed in this business

[emmasexytime]

Welcome back <3

If you want to build a list then do it, obviously it will take a ton of work to get big.

Study all these sites to see why they are big and each does.
https://nichepornsites.com/the-compl...of-porn-lists/

Good luck and once you grow a bit we would be happy to do some link trades

[Huggles]

Originally Posted by NoWhErE

This comment is EXACTLY why you will never succeed in this business

I was successful for like 15 years until I quit porn in 2016...

[gar]

You will be surprise the conversion rate for clicks from ThePornDude. Someone showed me stats of his pay site and wow. I couldn't believe!

So If you think you can find traffic. Go ahead. I might try to build one too!

[Ironhorse]

Originally Posted by gar

You will be surprise the conversion rate for clicks from ThePornDude. Someone showed me stats of his pay site and wow. I couldn't believe!

So If you think you can find traffic. Go ahead. I might try to build one too!

I've checked him out before and it's been inspirational in my approach. Although I have a very different format in mind, going back to some designs I made in 1998 that were not technologically feasible at the time, his sites are a perfect example of well crafted, functional platforms with simple but effective and appealing design. Obviously I'll never catch up to his years of experience and online presence but it's a good guide to making the web work for you even in the age of AI and dwindling user attention span.

[NatalieK]

If you build it, they will come


I think there´s nothing wrong with trying things with hard work & the right approach. If you sling lots of money into a project, it can go wrong unless it´s done correctly. But to work at something yourself & see how things go, you tell us in 2 years how you´re doing...

I hope well

[The Porn Nerd]

The only question that matters, really, is whether or not starting a Link List site in 2025 will actually make the creator MONEY.

Will it?