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09-04-2009 03:05 AM |
my stupid little life
(American Beauty reference). Anyhoo, people have been asking me for around 7 years to drop the story on my biz. here it is. it will probably bore the fuck out of most of you, so feel free to skip:
1996, i am taking a cyberphilosophy course at the University of Alberta (i think it was numbered 365). we did a bunch of things, but one of the things i took away from it was that this internet thing could make money. before i'd finished uni (major in Genetics, minor in Philosophy), i had a couple of accounts/pages set up with several adult verification services (adultcheck was the one that really got me going). so my parents are stoked that i'm making money, as i'd been a starving student since i started university. gf at the time was stoked too. though i did get both mine and my gf (at the time's) university accounts shut down for excessive usage lol.
around a year later, i started a small (read: shitty) paysite, using interbill as the processor. i don't think many people remember interbill, but anyway, they were super sketchy.
1997, i'm making around 4500 bucks a month, then, interbill stops paying me, and i am freaking the fuck out. in the end, they do actually pony up the amount owed (six months later) but by then i am with ibill, and was just barely able to cover the rent.
how was i getting traffic at this point? spamming the seach engines of course. it was easy as fuck to get a reasonable amount of traffic. infoseek? altavista? yep. load a page full of keywords, upload, and you were good to go. rinse and repeat.
1998, by now, i have an okay income, around 8K a month, life is good for a 24 year old guy straight out of uni. hooked up with a new gf, and using the money i'd save up (around 10K or so), we built a new paysite, and i dropped the 10K on a search engine called goto.com (it's called overture now) for advertising. they were the first (i believe) search engine to offer paid listings. anyway, it was a complete and utter failure lol.
girl leaves me, and things kind of go sour. my income drops to 4K a month, i am seriously considering going back to uni to do a masters, or possibly a trade school (my dad runs a small electrical company).
Then: someone (whoever you are, thank-you) submits one of my random spam galleries to the Hun. BAM. my piddily little virtual account could not handle the traffic (obviously), and i was super pissed. but then the sun came up over the horizon. this could actually be a good thing. i knew that night, that i would become a multi-millionaire. of course, no one i knew believed me lol. i remember telling my dad and my best friend exactly that right after the Hun listing, and they thought i was crazy. i totally understand why though. because it sounded crazy.
1999, i am making a solid 20K a month. pretty happy with everything. enter DavidD, formally of Candid Hosting. gave some great technical advice and super helpful 24 hrs a day. This is the point where i am adding server after server because the demand for my new, high quality (for the time) paysite and especially the endless galleries is going insane.
2000, i start shooting all exclusive video content (not personally lol). redesigned the site (you know what, i have almost told no one this, but i have designed ever reiteration of ultrawiredsex.com myself lol, straight up html by yours truly), and hired a team, an actual team of people, to do nothing but submit to tgps, to buy spots on tgps and build galleries. we worked 100 hours a week, but i paid my employees well. scaled the FUCK out of tgp submission. i also bought all of the top hun listings. they were a bit of a pain in the ass some times, but i got every available listing.
2001, just cranking the submissions, making 350K a month, after expenses. getting the video on every tgp on the planet. nice office in Banff, Canada, with 6 people working around the clock.
2002, i *think* this is about the time Mark (GTS) came into the picture. we cranked their paid submissions about as hard as you can crank anything. MONEY.
2003, not much changed.
2004, ibill goes tits up. i was lucky, and got paid far longer than a lot of other guys. i got paid consisistently until april 2005. they still owe me around a quarter million dollars though. don't think i'll ever see it lol.
2005, retired.
what i did i learn from all of this? SCALE. if you have something, anything, that works, scale that cocksucker up to as high as it will go.
ps: take a flight on the concorde ;)
cheers boys and girls.
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