[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.