The Old Site, as I’ve come to call it, was in operation for about three years, from 2004 to 2007. If I had to say what I’m proudest of, as far as the site was concerned, it was that I did almost the whole thing by myself. Sure, I had to find third-party services for webhosting and payment processing, and sparky helped by sorting through all the pics and editing video for posting, but the technical end of keeping it up and running was all up to me.
My years of experience in the tech industry gave me most of the skills I needed to build a website, and while what I produced then would probably get me laughed out of any interview as a software engineer, it worked. It was designed for low traffic and a moderate level of security*. I had only one bug in the security layer (that I knew about), and that was in the first week of operation. After that, the site pretty much maintained itself. Weekly updates consisted of uploading the new pictures/videos and updating the main database with descriptions of each scene, and the code did the rest. Simple.
The hard part was everything else. Finding service providers to make all this happen was not a trivial task. Most “acceptable use” policies explicitly prohibited the sort of thing I was looking for, and I wasn’t about to open myself up to a service outage over my content. The payment processor I chose had a very liberal policy — their only limits were underage models and live cam/chat. I certainly wasn’t after children, and it was an easy decision to take down the live cam — it was truly interesting only for an (unscheduled) hour or so a day, and thanks to my time zone, most of my audience wasn’t awake when I was active.
At first, all of the content was of me and sparky. There was plenty of variety among the various things we did, but having the same two people in every shot (many of them just of him) was not very interesting in the long run. A friend of ours was willing to participate for a few sessions, and we quickly opened up to more models. That was fun, but it opened up more challenges.
I had to do the record-keeping for everyone who appeared on the site: model releases and photo IDs, plus keeping duplicate records at a publicly-posted location. This was around the time that US Code 2257 regulations were coming down hard — many people in the porn industry were scrambling to pull their records together, even for content that had already been produced and distributed. Fortunately, all the noise made it easy to learn some general rules. We also got a legal team on retainer, just in case.
Coordinating the models was something else. I’m accustomed to people contacting me, not the other way around. I couldn’t use profile sites like Recon to solicit models because I had a commercial purpose. Somehow, they managed to find me — some were already subscribers to the site; others contacted me through my escort ads and we negotiated from there.
After a photo shoot with a model, there was additional pressure on us to process the pictures/videos more quickly than those of just ourselves. Often, we’d turn them around within a couple of weeks, but some took longer. Longer still for them to eventually wind up on the site, as I rotated content to keep it fresh.
When I finally got the call from the bank that they were closing my account, it was a bit of a relief — all the work dealing with models and processing content was overshadowing any pleasure we got from producing the content and what money we were making from it all. The reason the bank gave was that they disagreed with the content — it violated some kind of policies with MasterCard and/or Visa (despite that I could buy similar content from any number of sites using the same payment methods). They were still advertising the minimal limitations on their site, so I concluded I just wasn’t making enough money for them through transaction fees. I had only four chargebacks in three years of service, so it wasn’t like I was running a disreputable business. But they were getting less than $100 (including baseline fees) from me every month.
With various fees and taxes, my moderate subscription base, and other expenses, I’m not sure if I made any money in the venture or not. But that wasn’t my objective in building the site in the first place. I just wanted to prove to myself that I could build and maintain a business. In that regard, I succeeded.
* About security… I never had access to anyone’s credit card information. I’m thinking mainly about personal privacy (I didn’t use cookies, and I never shared my member list) and protecting my content from web crawlers.
