I work tangentially to porn in adult toys for about six years. Built an affiliate program, retail sites, wholesale sites and various other stuff. Don't really interact with developers in the business, though (outside of some time on GFY before I stopped caring).
Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?
51–60 of 69 posts
Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?
#52I used to be the R&D Director at Naughty America, here's what I built: http://techcrunch.com/2008/10/08/come-and-get-it-naughty-ame... http://gofuckyourself.com (NWS) is pretty much the hangout for adult affiliates and webmasters. If you're trying to build traffic, that's where you want to be. Funny enough, I seem to be at it again. My latest client is a porn startup.
What does the startup do?
Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
They are normally so poorly done because it does not matter. Most porn sites are either traffic sites or membership sites. If its a traffic site then the goal is just to upsell and send the user to another site and if its a membership site then the users care much more about the content than the site.
I think you're right. But at the same time, we know that Google is grading things on speed, and of course search engines love accessible sites (since they can read them easily too). Maybe I'll just have to make one myself :)
I can only speak for one company, but I believe the vast majority of traffic comes from affiliates and not search engines. I was pushing to do more SEO and SEM, but there was a fear that the affiliates would revolt if we started taking steps to cut them out (the industry standard is 60-70% revenue share from affiliate sales, good affiliates make a LOT of money).
Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?
#54I used to be the R&D Director at Naughty America, here's what I built: http://techcrunch.com/2008/10/08/come-and-get-it-naughty-ame... http://gofuckyourself.com (NWS) is pretty much the hangout for adult affiliates and webmasters. If you're trying to build traffic, that's where you want to be. Funny enough, I seem to be at it again. My latest client is a porn startup.
What does the startup do?
Nothing fancy, just a new porn studio. After the basic stuff is up and running we're going to talk about making it all whiz-bang.
I still have dreams about getting the "iTunes Store for Porn" idea up and running again, since there was a lot of interest from other companies about getting their content on there (I think it's the best way to save the industry from the proliferation of free porn). Plus, with the technical/marketing/mobile knowledge I've gained since then I can make it a million times better.
Unfortunately, without the content and resources of Naughty America behind me it would be tough to break away from client work long enough to build something that I could pimp out to content producers.
Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?
#55Funny, these AHN's come up every few months or so. I wrote a good portion of the code and architecture for the kink.com sites. Decided to leave after 4 years working there pretty much because my job there was done, things work really well. Despite what people might think, it was not hard at all to find a 'real' job again as my experience working in extremely high traffic environments is desirable.
Cool. I've been a member of the Kink site in the past and found it to be fast and well done. Did you just work on the back end stuff or did you also work on the design/layout of the site as well?
I did the backend stuff, but wrote a lot of the jsp pages as well. It is all Java/J2EE/JBoss/EJB3/Hibernate with some fairly complicated single sign on stuff going on to allow cross domain auto-login.
Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?
#56I have worked in adult for 9+ years and sold 2 sites. aebn.com / stockroom.com / domme.com etc... One of the sites i sold was called cameraphoneporn.com; sold it 8 years ago before mobile was big. IMHO the best thing about working in adult is that you gain a good understanding of affiliates and seo / marketing / conversion rates etc... and that is information that has helped me with my mainstream clients as well.
stockroom isn't porn, they just use it to sell whips.
Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?
#57I'm not kidding here, gofuckyourself.com is generally considered the most popular porn webmaster forum online. I've heard the quality has dropped in recent times though.
The quality is always dropping in recent times, at almost any forum you care to visit.
I feel a strong non-rational urge to write "hacker news is turning into reddit", and then rush off to reddit to write "reddit is turning into digg" on any-and-every thread, and so on.
Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?
#58Did some contracting on one of porn -tube sites. Also worked on lesbian "stuff" web shop. Crazy days...
Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
When I got my job in the porn industry they didn't advertise that was what it was for. Instead it was brought up during the interview process. They asked me a series of questions related to it as well. Like "For your day job you may have to visit bigblackcocks.com to make sure their website is functioning again, how do you feel about that?" and "We host a lot of content that might be offensive, if given root access w…
You just wonder whether they had hired somebody as an admin and they deleted everything... Once bitten, twice shy?
It happened while I worked there. It was a site that featured 18 year old girls that looked like they were underage. It was the guys third week on the job and while he had no issues with bestiality or anything along those lines he felt that a line had been crossed with hosting "child porn" even-though we had the records on file that said the women were all over the age of 18.
There is a reason we kept backups, and why the new guys (myself included in the first 4 months) were only allowed access on load-balanced systems so that if we did go rogue the downtime would be minimal while the more senior admins flipped a switch.
Re: Ask HN: Who is working/has worked on porn sites?
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think you're right. But at the same time, we know that Google is grading things on speed, and of course search engines love accessible sites (since they can read them easily too). Maybe I'll just have to make one myself :)
I can only speak for one company, but I believe the vast majority of traffic comes from affiliates and not search engines. I was pushing to do more SEO and SEM, but there was a fear that the affiliates would revolt if we started taking steps to cut them out (the industry standard is 60-70% revenue share from affiliate sales, good affiliates make a LOT of money).
Traffic sites == affiliate sites. @ aebn they have an entire traffic department that does nothing but throw up traffic (or affiliate) sites and drive traffic to their theaters. Also the pure affiliate model has been in decline for some time now. I also personally own about 10 traffic sites and each one has appox 10 affiliate offers on it. the term "Traffic site" has nothing to do with how the user gets to the site e.g.: organic search vs clicking link on 3rd party page. It simply refers to the purpose of the page which is to drive traffic to another site.