[dotBen]

Applying your startup skills to projects in the adult space will certainly help you wing your way to $1000/m v easily.

Big data/machine learning of all the meta data associated on tube sites, repurposing content for tablets, recommendation engines, social layers that are delineated/firewalled from the mainstream social graph, hosting/live streaming services for adult content -- are all opportunity spaces that come to mind.

Many of these projects can be kept on "life-support" and still bring in a healthy profit if set up correctly.

Please don't down-vote because it's porn - it's a legal and legitimate space

[jamesbritt]

Many of these projects can be kept on "life-support" and still bring in a healthy profit if set up correctly.

How do you know this? I'm genuinely curious; is this reasonable speculation (but still speculation) or do you have some concrete evidence of this working for people?

What I've read lately about porn sites suggests that the days of easy money are gone, modulo a few outliers.

[dotBen]

What I've read lately about porn sites suggests that the days of easy money are gone

What has disappeared are the "gallery sites" that were easy to make - often by hand - or using basic CMS's like wordpress.

Most of the people who say it is over are the "old skool" industry folks who hate the Tube sites because they represent a level of technical expertise that they cannot match (but most HN'ers can)

What is happening is real technology is disrupting the space and those without skills are getting pushed out.

People are still paying for porn, and content sites need to find the distribution and new leads.

I know this because my partner has a lot of projects in this space. I also know many people - from owners of some of the biggest content houses here in SF thru to engineers who work on startups and supplement their income at night through this kinds of projects.

It's actually more common then you think, most people just don't want to put their names to it.

[jamesbritt]

Thanks very much for the detail. I think the next step might be to identify some under-served niche. Though, given the Internet, I have a hard time thinking any interest is under-served, at least for long.

[olalonde]

I know a guy who built a "tube site" software in PHP when tubes were still fairly new and he was making ~10,000$/month within a few weeks. He didn't spend a dime on advertising, just word of mouth and posting on adult boards with a link to his site in his signature.

[getsat]

I've been wanting to build a niche video/picture site for a while (to deal with all the CDN/scaling issues involved myself), and I've also been looking for a project I can use this Programming Collective Intelligence book on.

Adult seems to be a good next project for me. The only initial unknown I can think of would be where content would come from unless it's user-supplied. Any other links/info/thoughts?

[yeahsure]

Several years ago I thought about building something in the adult market (never got to it). Your best bet is to go to the adult webmaster's board: http://gfy.com If you're looking for affiliate programs, if I recall correctly, they gave you tons of content for free.

Anyway... hope this helps - good luck!

[getsat]

Thanks for the link and suggestions!

[dotBen]

Content is licensable. If you join affiliate programs you get sample content to use for free, too.

Don't get into user-generated - too many legal and ethical issues.

[getsat]

> Don't get into user-generated - too many legal and ethical issues.

I've seen some pretty disturbing content uploaded to even sites about video games... this is definitely good advice. Thanks for the tips.

[fedd]

aren't all the niches filled?

[chopsueyar]

Is this a play on words?

[olalonde]

Ask there: http://www.gfy.com. It's the largest adult industry board. A lot of content producers do business there.

[getsat]

Great, thanks for the link!

[zacharyz]

For a good discussion on this subject check out roythunder's AMA over at reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/gt0l1/i_have_a_cs_degr...

He runs one of the slickest sites tube sites out there.

[nametoremember]

Where does the money actually come from? Other adult businesses advertising on your site?

[dotBen]

Affiliate deals with content sites - which are more than just advertising because they tend to have insane revenue sharing deals for the lifetime of the lead - often 50% split of membership fees for the life of the subscription.

So from just a single user signing up for a $30/month subscription, you would make over $180/year.

My partner enjoys a healthy secondary income (way way above the monthly figure mentioned in the original question) from such activity.

If you do big-data analysis and/or curation of content you can probably sell this to other sites too as many in this space are cash rich and tech-ability poor.

[pdelgallego]

Hey Ben, I would like to read more on this topic. Have you written something about it?

What are the needs and the problems that they are facing. How to identify the possible customers. Common affilate scheme in the industry, etc ...

[dotBen]

I've not because I don't actually have any projects in this space - my partner (Violet Blue) does and I help her with the technical side of her sites and as someone with a media/tech background I find a lot of it quite interesting.

[z303]

Kuro5hin had a good post way back on making money from thumbnail galleries

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/10/29/9314/1484

[naner]

Legal - yes, but for a lot of us not really justifiable. I'd rather flip burgers.

[hnhg]

And a lot of people would rather consume porn rather than those burgers. It's all subjective and down to personal taste. He makes a good point about not being downvoted simply for the market he's chosen.

[z92]

Because lot of people would rather consume porn rather than burger, and those same people would rather flip burgers rather than produce porn, is why porn is so profitable.

If that was not the case, porn would have been as cheap as dozons of say, ERP applications.

[zavulon]

Not sure why you're getting downvoted. You didn't pass any judgment on others, just saying that for you and others it's not justifiable. I 100% agree with you - I had many opportunities to go into that space, but had to decline all of them because I wouldn't feel right doing it, and would have a hard time explaining it to my parents.

[petercooper]

Which would also not be justifiable for a lot of people. Well, unless they were veggie burgers ;-)