Good thread :)

I have been working online since 1994 and it's been a blast....

Three years now iv been self employed and it rocks ..most of the time anyway but you def have to work a lot harder than being employed

people in this thread are top notch ice cream of the industry!

Began slowly working for myself in 1997 and went full time & quit my last "job" in '02.
Since then I've had boom years and lean years, but it's always been pretty much by choice. My dedication to it comes & goes in waves. Every couple of years or so I just get burned out and have to slow down and take more chill time than usual, and that usually translates into some big changes in the way I do things by the time I get fully geared up again.
But that works for me because my primary motivation has never been lust for more & more money. Being rich and being a peer-perceived "pimp" is not a requirement of mine, only being happy. I do this stuff strictly because I hate having "The Man" telling me when to eat, shit & sleep. And now, after doing this for so long, I am pretty much unemployable by the typical "job" because, a) I no longer have the mindset or will to punch a clock and bend over for some douchebag on a power trip, and b) I'm fully tattooed right down to my fingertips.

:2 cents:

Don't forget residual income....

thanks luv$. it is just really nice and inspirational to hear everyone's stories, since we are all some piece of the puzzle that is online adult 2010, how ever we contribute. Seems like most of us have a common goal to maximize our businesses and stay self employed...

Are you photographer, producer, affiliate or backend?

fletch, what was the first thing you ever did in adult? or have you always done design?

Graphic Designer / Video Editor / Audio Designer

very cool :thumbsup

Retired from former job at the ripe old age of 37,
been full time self-employed and a fulltimer in this business since '98.

Great thread!
Treat this like a biz and it will work.

I got into this by mistake in 2002..lol Really enjoy it!

But hustled since a kid....only reason I ever got a real job was cause my dad was always on my case about it. One day I did the math and said fuck your so wrong.

self employed online has been my only income since 1998. started when i was 21, never really had a 'real' job outside of part time jobs in highschool.

residual income can come from #2 or #3. You will make residual income from your retirement savings as they grow from interest collected each year. You can also make residual income from your business and other business ventures like rental property etc...


fuck the "pimp" mentality. While those people are busy collecting fast expensive cars to park in their garage, I am socking away money for retirement. My investments go up invalue, their cars depreciate fast. Then they need cash and sell them off for pennies on the dollar. What a waste of hard work to just piss the money away. It's one thing to spoil yourself a little, but you need to have balance. You need to take your check and split up the money, % to pay bills, % to savings, % to retirement, % to having fun with.

I try to make more and more money not to impress anyone else other than myself. The more I can make, the bigger my snowball of investments and retirement grows and the faster I can get to the point my passive income pays my bills and later in life my investments buy me those fast cars (if i choose to buy them). I can then work if and when i want to and never have to worry about working for the man, or myself if I don't want to. That's my motivation.

A LOT of people miss this. They either fall into the "blow all my money on toys as fast as I make it" group or the " make enough money to build up a savings, then take some time off and use up what I saved", start over do it again...

Yeah my parents are really hard core christians. They complain until they ask if I can help them. I send them money and then they are all of the sudden "cool" with what I do for about a month :(

I agree Will. I have not gotten any "toys" really. I am being pretty smart with my money, out of paranoia and the fact that when I do finally "splurge", it will most likely be to get back to Los Angeles, or the valley more specifically. I am waiting until the economy is better, so not holding my breath on that one.

Ditto same years been working as a consultant for that long:thumbsup

i have been self-employed for 8 years. Love it, cant go back.

That said i have to supplement my income by licking pussy....













....ok so i just do the licking for fun.

Nice thread DD, good to see a lot of folks are making it on their own and doing well.

Last J-o-b I had was working with AVN, and was unceremoniously canned because my boss and I didn't see eye to eye. He fired me on a Monday at 6:30 pm after I got in all my sales then removed me from the database so I couldn't get credit or commish. That same week I was t-boned on the freeway by a drunk driver who totalled my car and I got some mean air bag burns and scars to prove it.

That's when I found out who my real friends were, and many of them are in the industry. Several of them tried to get me rep jobs for some good companies, but I didn't feel that's the way I wanted to go. Then Baddog invited me to Internext Vegas and took me to a number of VIP parties (like the moviepost dinner) and I met some key people who ended up giving me some independent work, and lo and behold, I created PR Kitty.

First couple years were tough, I didn't know too much about a whole lot when it came to traffic and affiliates but I knew about marketing and networking. The learning curve was intense, simultaneously each project I got paid on went to the next show so I could start being more visible as I got to know more and more decision makers in the biz. It was also a challenge to be taken seriously as a female in a male dominated world.

Moved my biz from LA to Tampa, since there is no state tax in FL, so its good to be incorporated here. Vegas has no state tax either but is too dry for my taste.

I wish I could say that things are easy now, but I still spend about 80% of my day online and hustlin', but I definitely would not trade it for anything. I miss the regular hours, steady paycheck, and inexpensive health insurance, but had I had that, I would not be leisurely typing this from my bed in the middle of the afternoon nor would I have had nearly any of the cool adventures in far off places with people from all over the world I can call friends.

very cool!

I was amazed!! Why did you stop? I love the combination of your old band.

I started in late 2006 and for a year 1/2 let my partners build shitty-ass websites. LOL When I finished filming like 30 girls I stopped, looked around, realized nothing was getting DONE and I wasn't making a fucking penny, I decided to do everything myself.

I built shitty-ass sites that converted well with amateur traffic for about a year, learning HTML myself and building everything in Notepad, by hand. LOL Amazing when I think back on it but I learned everything on my own so I only modeled what I knew made money. I started making around $1,000 a month almost right away, and stayed there, for months! No matter HOW hard I worked, no matter HOW much traffic I sent to my sites sales were steady. That's when I knew the company I was with - an unnamed network of amateur/reality websites - was ripping me (and many, many others) off big time. On the one hand, it was easy money (relatively) working with them and they took care of all the things I knew zero about, like hosting, updating, yada yada. But on the other I always wondered how many sales I was really getting, and dreamed of the money I could make as a program/paysite owner instead of being a glorified affiliate (which is what I was, no offense meant to actual, hard-working affiliates).

I had been a journalist in the music biz for years before this, and had done some investigative journalism along the way, too, so while I am no Woodward & Bernstein I smelled a rat. So in January of 2009 I launched Mister Peabody World and dived head-first into the deep end of the Paysite pool. I had six sites then, now I have 18 (with four more coming next month) and today have gross revenues (network-wide) exceeding 1/2 million. Not bad for 1 year doing this full-time, and for being a one-man operation.

Did the two+ years of fucking around, getting screwed (and not in a good way) etc help/prepare me for this new adventure for Mister Peabody? Yes and no. But it's taught me that with never-ending effort, focus, HARD hard work, learning curves, a vision for how/when things will 'get better', an adaptable plan to help get you there and support from friends & family (as corny as that sounds) can still lead to success beyond one's expectations. Now, I live in NYC - no cheap place, tho my apartment is extremely reasonable at $1400 a month (1 BR) - and if I lived in Indiana or Arizona or Florida I would be living like a King. Here, I now merely have 'cash flow' (what a concept) and can pay my bills and order Japanese food every other Tuesday if I so wish. LOL But it will take success five-eight times my current level to 'free me' to where I can get back to doing what all this was intended to finance in the first place: the writing of my second screenplay and/or my first novel.

Meanwhile, I get tax-free sex.

So will I be able to work only, say, two-four hours a day, 2-4 days a week, someday soon and spend the rest of my time doing whatever the fuck I want to? Yes, absolutely, otherwise...I'm outta here. That's right, I'm giving myself a certain time-frame and if the Adult business doesn't get me there then I'll do something in mainstream, employing the skills I've learned during this adventure, to get me where I want to be. I've been successful (enough) with anything I've ever wanted to do in life so I know it's possible. We're not talking "I wanna retire when I've made eighteen MILLION DOLLARS" shit. I'm reasonable. 3/4 mil a year will do fine.

Anyway, it's all possible, even now, that's all I'm saying.

Your success, DigitalDivas, btw, is inspiring in its' own right. When I was looking at total monthly revenues of $853 and had to swallow my pride to ask my mom for three hundred bucks so I could eat and pay the Cable/Internet bill, and ask other friends to lend me a hundred bucks each just to pay my rent, I searched out stories like yours to inspire me, and keep me going. Congratulations on your success!

(And I did not leave journalism, journalism left me when the magazine I was working for let 90% of it's staff writers go, including me, and the blogosphere replaced much of 'old school' Fourth Estate institutions like the one I worked for. This was in 2003. I floundered for a couple years until I decided to shoot homemade porn. LOL The 'Mister Peabody story' bullshit I spin on the sites is actually fairly close to the sad, sad truth...)

In 1999 or so, I put up a hot banner for a big teen sponsor and got listed #1 in adultchecks search engine. Was self employed for 2 years.

Since then i've never looked back. Incorporated since 2001.

Thanks misterpeabody! I feel like I have only begun the journey. I don't have huge amounts of traffic for the sites in my sig, or the sites that are not in my sig. I do have a boatload of passion. I am a lifestyle foot fetishist. Beautifulfeetonline is from the soul. Digitaldivasonline.com will someday revolutionize the way that people look and surf for niche based adult content. At least I hope so. It is a beautiful index. Just as my sponsors are so deserving to have a home on the net such as the Digitaldivasonline Network. And it is still not complete.

Pretty humbling that you went from borrowing money from your friends to where you are now. I think if you remember where you came from that you will be fine and someday have your screenplay and or novel. I will also be sure of that and if I get "Big", I will never be "that guy". To be humble is always key. I will never be too cool to return email or talk to someone starting out with that same passion in their eyes.

The network is a work in progress, but I do intend on attending more conventions to meet more of my peers in the industry face to face. Because as this thread shows, we all have so many different and unique stories as well as many different drives to keep our noses to the grindstone so to speak. I think our collective new concepts, banter and passion is one of the things I admire most about this industry. Sure it's a scary time, sure everything that we thought we knew is an ever changing flow of technology. But, in some way or another, we are all in it together and thats pretty cool in my book. Especially with some of the talented people that are on this board, if we all banded together, and became one community, there would be nothing we could not accomplish, imho. On the internet or otherwise.

whats going on up in here?

since we are on the topic of feet, can you critique my foot vid?

http://www.gfy.com/fucking-around-and-business-discussion/952942-barefootsie-review.html

not really my thing mcfadden, but make the window bigger and I would do the data rate at about 4mbps, the increased data rate will compliment the increased window size quite nicely :thumbsup