there would be a few but the biggest was probably giving up too easily in 1998 and then waiting till 2002 to try it again

"Merging" my company Modelgig.com and putting the domain in his name with some fucktard that knew he was getting it for free in the long term. I didnt realize this and was fucking stupid. This was way back. Early 2004.

As a service provider to emerging technology companies, I can offer a different perspective on mistakes I see noobs make. Specifically:

1) Always underestimating how much things will costs. Exhibit A:"It won't cost anything to build a site and sell my product or service!!!" My advice: estimate how much you think it will cost, and then triple it.

2) Not putting in writing how things work out if you and your business partner disagree or begin to hate each other. Everyone always comes into my office and says, "oh, we're good friends, we'll work it out." 6 months later one of them calls and says, "he's a fucking thief! What to do I do!!!??" Word of advice: deal with that shit while you are still friends.

3) Nepotism. Don't hire your wife, brother, cousin, or whatever. It rarely works out.

4) Selling equity when you don't need to.

Doing business with Jay Servido of Teleteria and his bitch. The guy is still ripping off people to this day. He is on big pile of shit as is his old lady......avoid them at all cost :2 cents:

Picking ibill because it was the first processor ad I saw in a webmaster magazine. If ccbills ad was first it would of saved me 13k. lol

My biggest online mistake was not in adult.

The wife and I conceived and developed a BBS in the early 90s called Tri-City Online Classifieds - sort of a pre-cursor to eBay/Amazon/Kijiji. After planning it for two years - we launched it in '96. It never really got off the ground - we were already too late to the party.

It's still listed in the 519 BBS list.

We abandoned the idea without making the transition to the web with it...opting instead to focus more on our adult production.

Every time I found a profitable niche, site, traffic source, etc... I would blow that money without bothering to scale, reinvest, or duplicate what I had done. Took me years to treat this as a business with a plan and a formula.

Defiantly thinking that there is integrity among webmasters. It's all about the money for 90% of the internet business. Just goes to show what people will do if they can. A handful of people are costing millions of webmasters money to make a mediocre profit. At one point there was a little unsaid respect for the general good of all but now it's all about the money.

Game on!

Haha, this is pretty true tho.. :winkwink::thumbsup

probably underestimating my ability to do things in this business on my own

I'm still learning as I go and I have moment of frustration here and there (fuck you php), but figuring out how to do things for myself is rewarding and necessary.

no one will ever care about our $$$$ as much as we do as individuals. That mistake cost me some grief, but me and my $$$ are better off in the long run. If I could do go back and do things differently, I woulda chosen to trust my own capabilities right from the start.

My biggest mistake was not working more and expand my business when I had something that made me much money and required very little work. I wish I wasn't so lazy.
I had submitted galleries for like 3 years and finally started to promote paysites with other traffic-sources, money was so extremely easy and I didn't take advantage of that.

The same thing happened a couple of years ago when I was building blackhat-sites. You didn't even have to "wash" the traffic, just cloak and send it straight to the affiliate-networks like shareasale and CJ.com and make money. Google ranked crappy DynDNS subdomains and info-domains pretty high. You could also use wildcard sub-subdomains with DynDNS and build hundreads of sites under one subdomain. bluestore234.sdfye45.dyndns.com :1orglaugh

I will probably never learn, things will only get harder.

You mean "PIRIOD".

Around 2005 I lost control of 5 domains due to me not paying attention to expiration dates. I needed to renew the domains, but couldn't log into my Verisign account (I had lost my password an needed to reset it) because I had changed ISPs and had a different email address. I had also moved and had a different physical address. They told me to fax them copies of my ID and we could get it straightened out. I thought I had a few months left before they expired so I decided to do it after I got back from a week's vacation. While I was gone they expired, there was no grace period and someone bought them. One of the domains had all the daily TGP and MGP galleries I had posted since 1999 and the other had several hundred free and AVS sites. There was a lot of traffic there and about 75% of my income.

I contacted the guy that bought them and offered him $10K for them and he turned it down. I told him in a week those domains would be blacklisted on every link site and tgp because the galleries and sites were now gone and redirected to a big FPA. I explained how the traffic would be dead very shortly so he should just take my money and be happy he profited big on my mistake, but he wouldn't bite.

A month later he contacted me wanting to know if the offer still stood. By then I had contacted all the link list and TGP owners and told the what had happened so they wouldn't blacklist me and just those domains so getting the sites back would do me no good because now all the links to them were pulled. I told him I would give him $500 for them and he said no. Three weeks later he contacted me and wanted to take the second offer and this time I turned him down.

It was a harsh lesson. I basically had to start over from scratch.

Really? I always thought your first paysite was Assterdam, great domain btw :winkwink:

Best I did was 43 with Topbucks, not bad at $35 a pop though!

Amen to that! I started in this industry when I was a teenager and I just wish I had understood scalability back then! :disgust

this name rings a big bell...

in 1998 nobody took me seriously when I said I wanted to start a porn site in my country, nobody helped me out

Keep em coming guys. This is educational stuff. Great thread.

Here is a big one. When your processor demands IDs and model releases from you, un-redacted, give it to them unless you want to lose your account and ALL of your members and rebills. They are not bluffing. If you want to protect your models, as you should be able to, you WILL lose that account. They don't care about who is right or wrong or 2257 regulations, they will flat out put you out of business. PERIOD!

Starting stuff and not sticking with it. I had about 1234567846352 projects and maybe 10 "Finished" ones.

Buying Paul Markham dinner at WMA Amsterdam about 6 years ago.

trusting gfy :)

He sells cookie cutter paysites that are worthless. He has also been called out on this board for being a crook.....check out the search function or search the internet for scams.com, ripoff reports and other sites to report crooks. He has ripped so many people off, especially newbies who don't know better.

Jay Servidio, Teleteria and his wife are nothing but pure scum :2 cents:

getting in in 2008 instead of 1994

This and not thinking ahead when building a network of affilaite sites certainly hurt me.

Not working harder when things were much easier.

That sucks. I sat here on GFY and watched this asshole steal and sell all of the ex-bf's domains.One guy gave the ones he had purchased back unfortunately the guy who had the main ones wanted crazy money for them back.

I learned many lessons that night and the coming weeks after that but the main thing is trust no-one .



:disgust:2 cents::disgust

Not setting up tracking codes right

I invented the missionary position, but I was too short sided to get a patent. I lose royalty money every time people fuck now. Of course gfy posters wouldn't have paid me that much. Now if I had invented masturbation, I could roll with fabian!!!!

Ouch!

I actually have nightmares sometimes that I let my main domain expire.

Mine is similar to some of the others in this thread; not working hard enough when the money was easy. For a few years I worked only 1 hour a day, sometimes only a few days a week. And I was making more money then I do today :helpme

Another mistake; adapting too slow. I didn't start submit movie galleries untill 2008 and made my first blog in 2009 :-/

1. doing business with wrong people
2. not being consistent with the work
3. wasting time on gfy

this last one is the most important of all

My biggest mistake was leaving

Going to work a "regular" job back in the early 90's instead of continuing with my graphics and game programming. Hindsight is always 20/20, so go as far back as you want.

After getting into the adult business? Listening to people who supposedly "knew better" and not trusting my instincts that they were full of shit sooner than I did.

Not buying more bunnyteens.com spots for 5 bucks paypal each back in the day lol

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh