The one thing that has changed our industry
 

Our industry has changed in ways most of us cannot imagine...

When I first started in this industry.... Before you even thought about taking your first picture you have to design, build, and then maintain a computer (very difficult in the 1990s), then build a website (leaning HTML, server management), shooting content (Some of us scanned photos in by hand, and then for video we had to purchase and install special video cards), then get the traffic, then do the marketing, and then handle the affiliates... While talking girls into posing naked for cash.

It was expensive too. I remember spending $500 on a single hard drive - and getting a free "zipp drive" along with it.

These days... People who couldn't program the time on their VCR twenty years ago can build a website on their cell phone with little effort.

It's gotten too easy.

However, I did make 7 figures out of a 1500 dollar point and shoot Olympus 3030

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/AWoAA...N4M/s-l300.jpg

Three words: content, content, content

What? Did you say it was difficult? Even my wife was able to assemble a PC in 90s. A girl with economical degree.

That's not true again. There were many visual Web editors like m$ Frontpage and others. No HTML knowledge was needed to make a website.

And then there are those of us who painfully remember setting up Renegade (or whatever BBS software you found easiest to manage) to run local adult bulletin boards. Our KastleArchives.com existed as a BDSM BBS that pre-dated the 'net.

Granted, we weren't producing our own content at the time. Digital cameras were still a few years away and we didn't have the resources to do film.

Zip drives, geez...I remember those. We even had an HP Colorado travan tape drive at one point. But I still remember building our first PC-XT system with a 20mb HD and 640K of RAM. Twin 5 1/4" floppy drives. 2400baud Zoltrix modem which we eventually upgraded to a 14.4 USRobotics card.

The capabilities of the S10 Galaxy I carry these days would've been unimaginable back then. As you say, so much easier these days for a monkey to use a smartphone to do all the things it took an entire desk workstation filled with hardware.

I learned HTML by breaking down AOLPress.

i remember getting a 4 gig hard drive and wondering how i was ever going to fill it up.

I remember building web pages with Notepad, then Navisoft with Netscape Navigator. Built my first mainstream site in 1995. Frontpage just loaded up shit by the pound. Possibly the worst html editor ever.

I just remember the spankings i got from my dad after the first monthly internet bill landet in his mailbox.
(converted about 1600 Euro)

3 Euro per hour for the 150 km long distance call to reach to only aol access point in my state and additional, 3 Euro aol fees per hour.

That makes me feel old. I remember trying to explain to my mum why she would never fill up a 20MB drive...

I jumped in deep end with dedicated server and no clue and faired better knowing nothing. I moved onto other projects but any sort of effort now starting requires a lot of knowledge and a lot more hard work to get a result.
My old crew have moved on or passed on.. Rip sad now

I go back a bit further, with a bank of 20 or so VCRs built into shelves and wired together along with signal boosters and an even more expensive 'playback only motherdeck' to hold the mastertape... Then you had 'Shipping' on Tuesdays & Thursdays when you just spent all day applying labels and sending them out via Royal mail in discreet packaging.

This was in the days when a single decent VCR went for over £500 ($700) and the fine for sending 'obscene material' through the post was in the region of £30,000 ($42,500) and a minimum of 6 months to a year in Prison...

That's when it was 'hard'... The web came along, and it was simply another place to advertise your mail order VHS tapes :upsidedow

Thats without the costs of the initial tapes themselves, the camera to shoot the content on, and the girls were paid a lot better then, than they are now !

It may have gotten easier to build sites, but that doesn't mean shit. You still have to put in the work to be a success. Build it and they come doesn't work.

"design, build and maintain a computer" rochard the architect / annoying boomer has moved on from repeating his marine service to repeating about him assembling his computers being a big deal, something many of us were doing in our early teens

She is a Russian, so that does not count, as every Russian girl have tech skills :upsidedow

i miss frontpage... :(

Let's not forget BHI / Yahoo's GeoCities where many of today's old school webmasters began.

thousand years ago they had a medicine man
later there have been doctors that studied medicine
now you have specialists for ears, heart, bones etc...and even they need other specialists to handle the equipment or invent new and more powerful equipment.

every biz that is promising profits will be sooner or later occupied by specialists and while they compete with each other they will come up with new technologies that need new optimizations.

amateur biz can be handled by amateur because they calculate far before the comma. professionals count far after the comma and make the profits with mass.

Yeah, things are a bit easier now

Probably WAS very hard to design, build and maintain a computer... But I didn't do that. I just went out and bought a computer and plugged it in...

Wasn't cheap, but nothing was in those days...

Unforunately not too many members here do not understand this ( and very correct) concept. :thumbsup

It used to. Otherwise, we probably wouldn't be here today.

At Lightspeed Cash we originally used the Nikon Coolpix... LOL.

https://2.img-dpreview.com/files/p/E.../DSC_0048.jpeg

LOL bulletin boards were just before my time....

Youngsters...pfft.

:winkwink:

Paul Markham? :)

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh Same here now, it's too easy..

Not even a ten minute vr video

I remember deleting unnecessary program files in WordPerfect for DOS so it'd save space on my 20mb HD with 640k RAM.

And before that I remember GW Basic command lines to fire up a program before we had a GUI. We eventually designed our own GUI before DOS.

I love whenwe

If you were a one man band and couldn't afford to hire experts in their different fields.

The problem with the Internet is people who could do the "design, build, maintain a computer, build a website (leaning HTML, server management), get the traffic, then do the marketing, and then handle the affiliates" thought they were skilled pornographers.

Owning the right camera doesn't mean one can shoot content that will convert surfers. Same as owning the right computer doesn't mean you can use it.

I used to write it on bottom of my pages.

wow - did you really write that ?

Sure it is. But, one thing still remains the same selling things.

The problem with It industry is it is easy to enter. Anyone could be your competitor. You just need a laptop, an internet, your buddy programmer ans wola, you have started your own company.

I fully agree that it is harder today. However, it isn't all bad.

Let me compare it to model photography (which I have been for 23 years). In the last 2 decades, thanks to digital photography, the number of photographers have exploded. People in the photography business are complaining that digital photography has destroyed the business. I don't believe that, it transformed the business. We are seeing creative work that we did not see in the 90's. "Professional" photographers are outdone by hobbyists and it is driving an evolution. Business-wise, the competition is huge, but people are still making a living. It's only a lot harder to enter and stay in the race. But making money is seldomly easy.

I'm very new to the pornography business (as a creator. hehe), but I have the feeling that the same is true for porn. In the last 20 years, we have seen such an amazing revolution, from internetporn to VR. People are constantly looking for the new niche, which again adds to the porn world.

Not sure if you're referring to live models or manufactured ones. The biggest difficulty in porn is knowing the niche you're shooting, the buyer will know it and spot a fake quickly, people looking for a new niche rarely buy into it and you can't base a business on the few who buy, then handling the models. Porn models come in different forms, the few who know what they're doing and let the director be in charge, those who think they know what to do and do it their way and those new to modelling who are clueless and need directing.

But that is what made us "webmasters". I liked computers, I liked making webpages, and I like shooting pictures of naked women. I was shooting pictures of my wife and making webpages when suddenly it all fit into place together...

This post is bogus without pictures of your wife.

When "experts in their field" expect a disproportionate amount of the overall revenue, one is forced to lean towards being the best one man band they can be.

I've always preferred working my ass off in all the various fields than paying exorbitant compensation to middlemen. I was already proficient with the cameras, post-editing and most aspects of production...meanwhile my wife self-taught herself to html-code while I designed all the web graphics.

The only aspect we third-party contracted was webhosting. And eventually we took that over ourselves.

Marketing was primarily our achilles heel. We did a LOT of marketing and promotion, but we weren't as proficient as we could've been. That was the only area we regret not contracting out.

"Expert" suppliers in this biz have always been expensive and have not performed well for us. We have had the most success with hosting ....mojo..(remember when some people had servers in their basements?). Graphics....Yuu. CMS...elevated x. As far as paid traffic and pr? All I can say is live, learn, and don't get fooled again.

However, the number one thing that really changed this biz was adult friendly stable billing. CCBill and Netbilling come to mind. We have been with both since they first started. It was a breath of fresh air after scumbags crashed and burned.

I haven't looked at it that way. I think that "niche" is not just a "category" of porn, but the evolution of porn itself and how it is presented. Virtual Reality is an obvious one, but I might be biased. But also with platforms like OnlyFans, porn is expanding into different "ways" of presenting it. More models are "doing it themselves" and people are not just paying anymore for visual porn. They pay to have a "connection" with the model, the feeling of exclusivity.

And if I may really go outside the box, I just saw a firm, virtualmate, who is actually creating a rendered model that will respond to you, both physically and emotionally. Learning who you are, what you like and dislike, ...

I think the porn industry is now rapidly evolving and the ones that evolve with it, will survive. I know virtually nothing yet about the porn industry, I'm new, so I could be wrong, but I have seen what happened in the photography business and I think there is a clear analogy with the porn industry. It happened with the coming of the internet and I think it will happen again in the coming years.

The thing is most webmasters were full of bullshit.

Some professed to making loads of money buying crap content cheap, but never progressed above buying crap cheap content and few ever buying new good content to keep the sites alive. But all screamed out the key to success was new exclusive good content.

They told us producers they were making millions from their sites and if we gave them our content they would make us rich. Rarely happened, either they were ripping us off or full of bullshit.

Yes some programs were making a lot of money, their key to success was great content + lots of happy affiliates because the content converted and kept getting produced. But when they approached us they claimed they could only pay a fraction of what we were earning and retaining the copyright to the material.

While some mistakenly thought taking pictures of their wives qualified them to shoot porn!!!! :upsidedow

It's a pity you never grew from driving traffic to having a site like DDF, Sapphic Erotica, etc.

The biggest downfall of online porn is illustrated in this thread. One man bands were able to cobble together a site, drive traffic and make a wage, good or bad. That allowed 100,000s in and they all had to share the people who were already buying porn. From offline where one man bands had to be experts in one field. I can only shoot and sell content. Couldn't edit, print, distribute or sell the magazines. Generally editors, printers, distributors and sellers of magazines couldn't do anything else.

Designers and programmers are one off with a back up plan to keep it working. The only things that require constant work are traffic generation and content production. Neither can be done by "jack of all trades" people.

Content production especially. You need to constantly looking for the right models, shooting them properly in different locations, to the right standards of the niche and style. Otherwise you have nothing different that 1,000s of other sites have to attract affiliates and surfers. Nothing to really convert, retain and keep coming back. Look at all the truly successful sites and see what separates them from the rest. Because if you could be a "Jack of all trades" outfit, so could 1,000s of others.

Marketing something no better than the next man's product is tough. Marketing something that's better than the rest is easy.

Expert suppliers fall into two categories. The bullshitter who is trying his luck and will come down because he's got no options. And the one already earning better money elsewhere. He won't drop his prices to earn less.

Niche has always meant a particular fetish or preference to the type of porn that turns the individual on.

Yes porn is evolving from people willing to pay to people never paying and getting the personal effect in is essential. Getting models to market themselves, get content shot of themselves, then giving them a platform they can use to publish their work on. The problem is can you pay them enough to elevate the content above a girl with a camera on a tripod or partner shooting her above the level of the 1,000s of others?

Look at MyDirtyHobby | Live Sex Chat, Cam Girls, Amateur Sex Community and look at the level of most of the content. Few are earning anything above a decent wage. Most are shooting themselves, with a GF or BF who rarely changes. The exceptions are rare and few progress beyond an "Amateur" level.

VR has failed despite all the claims made, just like 3D. Technology will not solve the problems of why should someone pay for something that's available for free and no different from 1,000s of others.

I am pretty sure they have never showed you their income.
I personally know a few of them with monthly incomes above 50 k. and the content they produce is as good or as bad as everybody can produce it. some of it just shot with handycam with no concept or idea behind.

you can´t compete with any amateur that knows how to promote herself. this is not a question of quality - this is a question of empathy.

yawn. You know this how? You are clueless.

shot content on this for about a year
https://www.thephoblographer.com/wp-..._L-770x578.jpg

Quite true. Over the years we changed billers several times after getting caught up in the iBill debacle for awhile. And each time we had to switch, we lost recur billing momentum and had to start from scratch.

That's a tough pill to swallow.

Started FUBAR with a 2 megapixel Olympus :1orglaugh