Originally Posted by Paul Markham
(Post 18832798)
As someone who was introduced to the Internet in the early 70s, my two brothers were both training to be programmers. In the days of machine code. I've seen the Internet grow from something that linked colleges, plus what ever Governments were doing with it, to today and it being in most Western Households and a lot more places.
From transferring at a snails pace to today's high speed connections. Obviously with the Internet being another outlet for the porn I was shooting or another way to sell the porn direct I was in online porn long before most here. For the mail order business I was a merchant able to take money with cards present or not. Mostly not. So taking orders online was easy, just needed the number and expiry date for me to fill in the form and add it to my bank deposit slips. no such thing as Epassporte and online billing then.
Selling the images we were selling to magazines, to sites was also something I did a lot of. Did open a site in the 90s and it was small beer for me, should of done more work on it. There were no affiliates, no boards and the only real place to promote were Newsgroups. No secret, I sucked at it because I was too busy shooting videos and sending them out via the post. :Oh crap
Yes trolls, before you knew there was a boat I missed it the first time around. :1orglaugh
Still the good times for online porn started around 1998. Some will say a year earlier, some will say a year later. Different sides of the same coin.
The main markets were as then the US and EU. There were people in other places viewing and everyone did everything they could to monetise the traffic. Remember phone billing? Still around but not big money. The meat of the revenue was and still are countries we could bill, with a decent standard of living and always had access to porn of some sort. Maybe not ass banging teens like Max Hardcore, but they had Mayfair, Penthouse and often more.
And that's where a bulk of the market online probably came from. Not the traffic, the buyers. As the Internet grew, offline decreased. For many reasons. Availability, price, value, free, and micro niches that it simply was hardly worth launching a lot of lines.
Why buy a magazine when all the pictures any reader could ever hope for were free on The Hun? Yes some bought, 1-500 of surfers maybe. What was being spent on magazines, was being got for free on TGP sites, with a few buyers.
Remember all the people saying you're losing customers getting them off for free with hardcore images?
Then what about the people who could log into a site, download in a month, cancel and have 3-4 months of brand new porn for their enjoyment. Contrary to what some say, rarely is a site so good they have to have the very latest update on the day it comes out. They have 3-4 months worth of brand new content on their Hard Drives. Sales of HD's took off and many now employ tools like Throttlebox.
Yes brand new world for some who never knew the old world. I knew both and sad the online sector paid so much for something that's so easy to get and killed so many sales trying to get it. Still the affiliates won't like that. Not their fault, they took advantage.
Even Mike says there are many little ones who moan about their income. In offline, they have expenses and go bankrupt. The bar is set higher, so few moan, too busy making money, or were.
Would I have done anything differently given the knowledge I have today of online porn? Yes and so would most here or know they're stuck with the little they have. We would all change something. I would of sunk some money into getting my sites really going, employ someone to submit by hand to Newsgroups all day long.
Given the knowledge I had then would I of done it differently? No. As most here would say. We work with the available knowledge we have and the skills.
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