Oh boy, another newb who thinks he knows everything ... who will disappear as quickly as he came. A failure walking in the door and a failure walking out.

And even years before that your magazines may have been, like many others were, scanned and sold on membership BBSs.

Been here for years bud. But spent my time diversifying, evolving and now laughing at the lot of u

The BBS folks tended to give credit. One of our early articles was on this thing called a "GIF" (:1orglaugh) which allowed BBS posting. The Usenet folks did not give credit, at least at first. Eventually, there were Usenet songs written about my partner. I personally didn't post because the Usenet thing of thanking strangers for posting scans and being dicks to people posting work they actually created . . . well, it made me sad.

Diversifying and evolving.

Uh...doesn't that just happen in life naturally? Since when did that become a career? :1orglaugh

What do you do? Skill set? Own anything?

My 5 year old nephew diversified and evolved in kindergarten this year lol

Just fucking with you...it's just that I'm jaded after reading GFY for years and seeing posters come on here with vague descriptions of themselves with nothing to back it up.

Really??

Of course not. I probably pay more in taxes each year than he's made in his entire adult life...and since he's probably a teenager that isn't very long. :1orglaugh

The 2000s were probably my best years as well.

The reason for the problems today isn't piracy. It's this industries inability to compete with it.

Nothing has changed in 12 years to what we do. Build a cheap site, spend a fortune throwing traffic at it and let the devil care.

The fact that affiliates were earning so much shows the problem. Sponsors were left with too little to build up their business with. You were on Revshare, 50% or 60% or more?

Paying out that kind of money to anyone who does little than direct people looking for porn to porn is ludicrous. But is became a game of leap frog. Until the leapers hit the brick wall.

The problem today is to much free porn and too little reasons to get a credit out. That was the same when you were making millions. If your sites or efforts were converting 1-100 of the surfers consuming the product. You were feeding 99 with a reason not to by.

Complaining about how you can't make a living today because of free porn, what ever guise it is, is ironic.

Once the Adult Internet adopted the business plan of giving away free content to get surfers to view free sites, so some would buy porn and spend more on this than on often everything else combined, the route to today was set.

It was teaching people a bad precedent, that porn is free. however I see why they did it. Even in 200 people selling porn were saying "Why does anyone buy, when so much is available for free?"

The only thing that held the system in check was hosting and BW costs. We all knew that unless a gallery and tour were good, BW costs on a gallery on a major TGP site could cost more than it made. When advertising a product costs more than it returns, then it's a sign something is wrong. Unless the product is real crap. Then few will sit and view the free images.

Still the ladder was placed in front of us and we happily climbed it.

It began with 10 images on a gallery and the top of the ladder is whole sites being given away. OK that's pirated content, so let's for a moment be dreamers and dream that tomorrow piracy online disappears.

99% of those pirating will end up on Tubes. In fact dreaming 1-100 will suddenly switch to buying is dreaming as well. Robbie might find a small increase in sales, as he has Claudia Marie and if she is exceptional she might pull in a few buyers.

For most here they don't have a unique product. They have the same stuff being given away for free on Tubes. Very few sites have a great product, very few have a unique product.

Is that because the industry was too complacent 5-10 years ago when seemingly money was slushing into online porn. Or was it slushing out just as fast to pay affiliates?

I find it ironic that someone who made so much money giving porn away is now complaining too much is being given away.

This is very very true.

100s here talk the talk and with no proof.

Been here for years bud. But spent my time diversifying, evolving and now laughing at the lot of u"

No one has diversified and evolved in online porn. They just copied what has been done before. Or invented better ways to give away free porn. Proof or it leaves us thinking OH YEAH????

Someone who knows nothing about offline porn posting again.

The offline magazines were well aware of it.

Collecting a whole website on a dial up. :1orglaugh

You mean downloading 5 videos and 10 images sets that were so compressed it was hardly worth the trouble. Early websites, as you point out, were not even mosquitoes compared to today sites.

As for the financial Melt Down. :1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

What caused the melt down of online porn was the slow down growth of online surfers in countries worth selling to, saturation of free and paid for porn and the end game of free porn. Tube sites.

Need to correct you on that, as it goes a step further. It is stealing + giving that stolen material away for free, conditioning an entire generation of what should be consumers, into thinking that everything should be free.

The industry has always had pirates, but at least they used to charge for what they stole. The same with the DVD side of the business, there have been pirates there back when it was only VHS, but the difference is, they stole them and SOLD them. They didn't hang out in the parking lot of a video store, handing out free copies of every movie that was inside the video store.

There is a huge difference between pirates of old vs modern pirates. Pirates of old sold what they stole. I can at least respect that. Modern pirates use what they steal as a loss leader in an attempt to sell something else. And some dumb asses just steal it and give it away for internet cred.

Thanks to Robbie, Borked, and Sticky Fingers, we've cut our piracy from paysites down by 90% or higher. Yes, really. Almost everything of mine out there today is either old DVD content or old site content that we're either still cleaning up or strategically leaving some online. So we adapted, and we are far from dying. Business is not what it was a few years ago, but at the same time we have been seeing a lot of growth over the past 6 - 9 months, so I believe our efforts are finally paying off.

Oh... and I still like to complain every now and then, because the whole thing is just a stupid and irritating problem to have. It's like getting molested by your dirty uncle as a kid and your family knows about it, yet still lets him come to all the family events and calls him a great guy.

Proof? U mean other than the fact that I'm
Not on GFY 24/7 because I have better things to do?

This kind of thing may explain why some people here think piracy is worse than it used to be. You are oblivious to what actually happened in the past, even after the DMCA.

Far from downloading compressed images, software was custom made to collect and sort images, and images were not collected on the basis of whether they induced a boner, but by their CRC. If the CRC did not match what was in the CSV file for that particular image set, then the collectors wouldn't even keep the image, however much, by sight, it resembled the original. IOW they went to great lengths to make sure what they collected, and distributed, was the actual image from the site.

Personally I found that whole thing way too sad, obsessive and pointless, but the fact you are apparently unaware that it even happened demonstrates how clueless you are on this subject.

The only people who stole crappy compressed images were the people in the 'industry' - reaming each other, and their paying customers, back then, just as now - before they went 'legal' and become DMCA crazy in the 2000s; because the only time anyone really gives a rat's about piracy is when their own content is being 'stolen'.

If you accept how small sites were, with primarily image sets, why do you find it hard to believe you can download a full website on dialup? I once downloaded a 500mb video on dialup in the late 90s. IIRC it took about 2 days, which sounds about right because it was about 15/20 minutes for an mp3 of about 3/4mb. So in theory lets say 6GB a month on dialup non-stop. And there were plenty of people downloading (and uploading) 24/7.

150K is way too high an average image size even for a decade ago. But even at that size you could download well over 1,000 images a day on dialup.

Nobody sat there at their screen watching their downloads either. Set the download going, go to bed, wake up the next day to the latest pristine, uncompressed CRC-authentic picture sets from Suze Randall, MacAndBumble or whoever.

Yep, major well established companies are going to the wall and entire countries are collapsing, but keep dreaming that porn lives in its own bubble and is somehow immune from that.

Keep dreaming than when people are worse off due to the recession and are forced to cut expenses where they can, they'll always keep that $30/month subscription going.

If you were in this business you would understand why you are wrong.

Let me help you:
We took measures to protect our content against piracy as well as a lot of innovative ideas in the members area that create a ton of interactivity that can't be stolen.
The result: Claudia-Marie.Com is one of the handful of paysites left that is still making great sales and has members rebilling for YEARS.

Also: Live Cams are doing BETTER THAN EVER. Hundreds of millions of dollars. Claudia Marie is making $500 a day just working 2 hours a day on Streamate.

Also: Prostitution and Strip Clubs The money there is BETTER THAN EVER

No...the economy never slows down peoples need for their vices. Alcohol sales are up. Movie theater sales are up. Overall adult industry sales are up (cams and dating)

Only one thing is down...Paysites & DVD Sales. Why? Because they are available for FREE on a thousand different pirate sites.

This ain't brain surgery. I don't understand why you can't see what's right in front of you. But I guess if you were actually in this business and looked at the numbers I do, then you would grasp it.

This guy Peorge cracks me up man. LOL
Don't you guys realize it's Barefootsies "arguing" with y'all? Look at the language patterns "bud". C'mon people, I know it's August and it's kinda slow but please.....LOL

By the way Jingo: You rarely hear me complain, or whine, other than CCBill's inexplicable "patterns" upon occasion. And, as is often the case, i see both sides here: If you made 400k and are now making 100k while doing thrice the work (yes, i said 'thrice') it's natural and understandable to go on an "Industry board" and bitch.

While at the same time, you have a point here: it's still better than working a jackhammer in the hot summer sun for a living at minimum wage. Or working at WalMart, etc etc etc. So STFU, oogle the ta-ta's and be happy with whatever you can scrape outta porn.

Your problem Gaul is you say how much $ you make without posting any proof or clues whatsoever, and on the Interweb that's a real sign of BS. Sure, many here are sig-less but, when pressed, will provide a link or three. You?

Please save this tiresome "if you were [blah blah blah]", "if you knew [blah blah blah]" BS for whoever it is you imagine is impressed by it. If you have evidence that the porn industry is somehow immune from the financial problems that every other industry has suffered from since 2008/2009, save your keystrokes for that instead.

Make your mind up. You're either bucking the trend or you're losing sales since 2009.

Cams, dating, strip clubs, prostitution, alcohol, movies. Which industry are you not an authority on, just for the record?

Box Office is Down 20%. Should Hollywood Panic?

Even without any hard figures to back up your claims, all your post indicates is that people are bored with 'uninteractive' porn and given a choice will spend their money with a real person, or the promise of it, rather than with jpegs and mpegs.

It says nothing at all about piracy.

There are already free webcam sites and free dating sites, which if we accept cams and dating are doing well, prove that free doesn't stop people paying.

And if all it takes to combat piracy is to start a cam or dating site, why doesn't everyone just do that and stop whining?

No, far better to just blame piracy for the fact that people are getting bored with the same old shitty, 1990s-era concept of what a porn site should be.

Things change. People use Facebook now and former giant MySpace is dead. What spurious excuse that has nothing to do with reality can you pull out of your ass to explain that one?

I guess piracy is non-existent with Hollywood movies then. Here's a page about Blu Ray sales increasing (and while overall spend dropped, nowhere does it mention the P word as the reason):

"Weaker theater performance for films released for home viewing likely drove the overall spending drop, Sanders said. Box-office receipts for new releases ranked 16 percent lower than a year earlier."

(Guess they didn't hear the news from Robbie At GFY that sales are actually up.)

The recession also hit home-entertainment sales in recent years, Sanders said.

Amazing isn't it. The recession hits everywhere but porn. Or rather, everyone else is willing to acknowledge the effects of the recession on business, except idiots selling porn.

If you ever post any numbers to support your argument, I'll take a look at them.

thanks for identifying yourself as an idiot

makes it easier for everyone

i really dont think anyone cares

No I'm not. I was a member of APIC and we knew all about piracy in the mid 90s. Yes you could download a whole website on dial up. And do what with it? Rent a server, load it to the website and sell it?

No some hijacked newsgroups and put the images into a site. A few did well, majority didn't.

Stop talking you're looking foolish. Suze Randall was also a member of APIC. Not even sure MacAndBumble existed then. Members of APIC included many of the top shooters and mags in the business.

Yes the economy has caused a slowdown. Companies who were not doing so well are now suffering. The downturn in the economy is nothing compared to the downturn in porn. You're praying that all the people who turned off paying for porn will be around and will to pay for porn when it gets better. You're dreaming. They will stay where they are. There's not enough reasons to come back to paying.

Look at ratios from 2000 to 2008. They got worse and worse, the only thing that kept online porn going was the extra surfers in countries we can bill. That's over. There's not the increase to be had today. Fabian boasted 20 million surfers on his Pornhub Tube site, that's just one Tube. That traffic is buying at a ratio that would bankrupt him 2/3 years ago. Go dream all will change when the economy improves. Any ideas when that will be?

What sites do you own?

What do you actually do in online porn.

Who are you?

We know who Robbie is, his sites and history. You're the nobody.

This however I do agree with. This industry has proved itself largely incapable of adapting to 2008. Good luck if it ever will.

Live great porn is the only way, pre-recorded dull porn is dying. Well that's not true, paying for it is dying. Do you think they will rush back to pay for it in a few years? Because it could be years before the economy improves properly.

I met a chilean webmaster who used to made $35 a month, 1 sale with ND a month and that´s it :)

Did we ever meet when you were in Atlanta?

You definitely are NOT in this industry. Why are you on GFY? Do you imagine that you are the first dumbass to ever come on here and try to tell people like me how to do my job? Do you imagine you are the first guy with zero experience to try and tell me how to make money?

You aren't. It seems to be some sort of fascination with outsiders to THINK they know what they are doing.

I'll tell you what...drop me a line if you can ever afford to come to Vegas. I'll pick you up from the airport, drive you to my 5,000 sq. foot home and take you out by the pool to my office and show you some real numbers.

Until then..you're just another clown.

Five minutes ago you claimed that wasn't possible. Now, after I explained it wasn't just possible but it happened, you "knew" it was possible all along. Okay.

Who are you talking about here? People trying to make money from piracy or piracy in general? People who tried to make money on it sold it on the web. People who were interested in getting sites for free just traded it. You don't need a website to do the latter.

Come back when you have actually Googled what Usenet is, because it's apparent you have no idea. And I don't know what you mean by "then" but I'm talking late 90s/early 2000s. Suze was so popular her fans created a newsgroup just for her pics, created on Sat, 06 Jun 1998 01:53:33 GMT.

Thousands of people have lost their jobs, long established companies have gone to the wall, banks have folded and entire countries have virtually collapsed. Yes, that's nothing compared to dropped porn ratios.

Whose fault is that? Who are you blaming for the fact that people can't make a product that 'nobody' wants? People complain as if they have a divine right to permanently and for ever make the same money year in, year out. Sure, that's how it works everywhere else, right?

Well then it's over. How's the porn magazine industry these days? I doubt many of the pioneers of web porn really care about the demise of that.

Everyone seems to be able to see that people prefer 'interactive' adult sites, and even talk about how successful those kind of sites are, but some people seem intent on just complaining about it, rather than changing to accommodate it.

Am I at least the first person to request those "numbers" you have? Because it seems that you'd rather argue about things I didn't say, rather than address things I did say.

Thanks for the friendly offer. You know what I'd do if I had all the monies you obviously have? I'd spent my time on a message board complaining about hard times.

Is it just me or is there less whining at BH boards?

Learn to comprehend. I've never complained about having "hard times". I pointed out that if you lose a big chunk of revenue it's not unusual to bitch about it. You wouldn't know since you have obviously never had a big chunk of revenue to lose judging by your posts.

Actually I'm homeless, penniless and posting this from the local library. So now we have established that I have no money while you are super rich and successful, do you want to repeat it again in case there's anyone left who you haven't impressed yet, or do you have anything interesting and relevant to say instead?

Sure: You're a loser. And I'm a God.

Now get the fuck off of GFY . This is for the Adult Industry. :pimp

Omg. This thread proves my genius. Thank you step # 7

I remember having a Hayes or 3com dual 56k modem.. It was almost as good as ISDN for a "fraction" of the cost. Them was the days.

Robbie isn't the type who goes off bragging all of the time :2 cents:

Paul you fail time and time again to understand that it is a free market. If one company start offering 10 pictures, affiliates will go to them. If another company offers 20 pictures to use the affiliate will go to them instead. It is natural. There is no point saying stop, because companies are out to make money.
Even if affiliate companies limited free content and we lived in this magical world there would always be one who would offer a large amount just to gain an advantage.
You seem to say day in and day out about giving too much away for free. Well its happened, we don't live in a dream world. Its business and affiliate companies know that.
The same is true of affiliate payouts. the same logic.

So please just stfu, I am sick of reading your posts on how things should be when your fantasy is never going to play out. You really do like to flog a dead horse.

What are people supposed to do? Hang their heads in shame and say well we blew it and preach to others about how everyone fucked up, or carry on and innovate? Yes its difficult, but I am up for the challenge.

Did I claim it was impossible? If I did I was wrong, it was pointless for most people. Some who did it to put up sites didn't know how or where to buy content from. That's why I sold to many of the ones APIC contacted. Others were working on a shoe string and couldn't afford to buy. And then there were the assholes who said it was public domain. The worse ones were those hot linking off Newsgroups and organising them into a site. b

Piracy in the 90s was a gnats sting, annoying and nothing more.

Yes ans Suze was doing her best to get them taken down until she opened a site.

Truth at last. Online sales are booming. Go Google it.

I blame sponsor who thought they could spend a fortune on traffic that didn't sign up and little on traffic that did sign up. Here you're talking my tune.

Free porn on TGPs started the demise, now free porn has more or less killed it. Most of the magazine owners are sitting very comfortably now. You no nothing about offline porn.

Do you know the cost of having a live interactive site that's not a partnership between the webmaster and model?

Go and do the sums, then figure the rest out for yourself.

You know little about everything about the online porn business. Yet seem to think you know a lot.


What do you do, who are you and why are you ignoring this question?

I don't fail to understand. It's the opposite I realised that once you started giving away 10 pictures, the only thing that would stop people giving away free porn was the cost of giving it away.

As the cost dropped, more and more gave more and more away. Until today where it's not 10 pics, it's 1,000s of scenes.

The horse isn't dead, it's alive and growing. Unless free porn has disappeared.

Well realising that it was a fucked up system would help.

Innovate, got any suggestions?

I have but the problem is affording them today. And finding people with the will to innovate. Nice to know you think you are. Will wait to see what you do to innovate.

I can see your innovation kicking into action. Is this your site or you just earning on joins to the affiliate program? https://wm.mtree.com/webmasters/ref/?334486

Sadly this guy is talking the talk and that's it. No walk. LOL

Do you really believe this or just trolling?

Haven't got a problem with him, or anyone else. However it's rather tiresome and unproductive constantly responding to any argument along the lines of "I'm better than you", rather than just addressing or challenging points that are being made.

As we've already discussed, the WWW and the number of people online was a gnat's sting in the 90s. There were about 20,000 sites in mid 1995. I doubt many of them were porn sites, but I'm willing to bet, of the ones that did contain porn, free or pay, most contained 'stolen' (unlicensed) porn.

Meanwhile, while the WWW was still relatively nothing, Usenet had tens of thousands of newsgroups. Most of those did not contain porn, but I can guarantee there was more porn on Usenet than the web at the time. Anyone who thinks otherwise simply has no idea how small the web was and/or how popular Usenet was.

The Usenet newsgroup for porn videos, that people would capture from tapes themselves and upload, was created in 1994. How may porn sites had video in 1994? Given that there were less than 1,000 websites in total at the beginning of 1994 and less than 5% of those were .coms, how may porn sites even existed then?

The WWW wasn't just a gnat's sting back then compared to today (where now it effectively is 'the internet') it was a gnat's sting compared to the rest of the internet at that time. 'Piracy' though was alive and kicking and accounted for almost all online porn at the time.

Are you talking about websites? Because I'm talking about Usenet. Not only did the people posting create their own software to file, organize and authenticate the images from her site, they had CSV files based on full CD-sized collections of images. There were many CDs of Suze Randall content, all neatly sorted into folders; likewise other sites. And the people doing it were on those sites the day they opened for business. There were sites I hadn't even heard of with their content on Usenet, and I used to wonder sometimes if uploaders were also affiliates of the sites.

Suze did, I believe with the aid of BayTSP, effectively stop the newsgroup dedicated to her content from functioning in the early/mid 2000s by targeting the posters of her material. For their part, they probably just moved elsewhere to trade her stuff.

I can't remember a time when there wasn't free porn on the internet. It was there long before you or anyone else ever dreamed of making your first porn website, because it was there before Tim Berners-Lee had even announced the WWW, which, BTW, he did on the very same Usenet that already carried free porn. You see, it's not free porn that's the cuckoo in the internet's nest, it's paid for porn.

Even before the internet people could get free porn. Everyone had at least a friend of a friend who had porn, which was actually often the only way to get it. Even in countries where porn is legal there aren't porn shops on every corner of every highstreet.

What you actually have now is porn on an equal footing with any other business. No need to go to a bad part of town in a dirty raincoat; it's just as easy to get Hustler as it is to get the NY Times, and it's completely legal in every country where people have credit cards.

And yet some people in porn stick with the mentality that it's seedy, shady or otherwise not legit, treat people as marks rather than (valued) customers and use black hat tactics (that just fuck off potential or current customers) that should have been marginalized years ago but are still tolerated and even encouraged.

Meanwhile, you go to a Tube site and get exactly what you're looking for with no bullshit.

I asked you how magazines are faring, not how much hay the owners made while the sun was shining.

Instead of posting this you could have simply posted the sums you have done. Or is that what you just did?

Are you seriously asking, or just trolling? Do you have a good reason, preferably backed with evidence, why porn is immune from the recession?

I don't think so. I'm pretty sure I'd have remembered you. I was in Atlanta when Blue Blood first started having a web presence, so the BBS thing was sort of on its way out by that time.

What a lame troll explanation. I did address what you said. I've been in the entertainment biz for a long time and it is pretty much recession proof. But you didn't accept what I told you (as a person who is actually in this business) and instead insulted me.

Which then prompted my response. And from reading what you are saying...you sound like the hundreds of other surfers who come on here that have never owned a business or been in the entertainment or adult industry. So for me to have YOU pontificating on how things work is laughable.

If it's "tiresome" to you...then simply put me on IGNORE.

Here are your choices:
You can believe that things work the way you THINK they do with nothing to back it up.
You can believe things work the way thieves and pirates THINK they do because they are making millions of dollars stealing other people's work and destroying the vast base of the industry at the same time.
Or you can listen to someone like me who is an honest, hard working, creative, innovative person who actually CREATES and doesn't steal. And has made millions over the last 15 years and today will make more money in this business with my knowledge and ability than 99.9% of the posters on this forum.

Pick one. Never mind. I guess you're gonna go with your own "theories". Typical. You are so common and don't even realize it.