Adult Webmaster Trade-offs
New webmasters often consider making adult sites but aren’t sure if it is a good idea. There are definitely good things about adult sites along with some bad things.. I hope to cover some of those issues here which can help you decide whether or not you want to get involved with the adult industry
Good things about adult sites
- Sex sells. Porn sites, adult dating sites, sex toys, movies, etc are a HUGE business. People buy these products.
- Lots of Affiliate programs - There are a lot of good adult affiliate programs, and people can do very well promoting these products.
- Many Niches Available - There are a lot of niches relating to adult sites since there is a wide variety of fetishes and other things people are into sexually. Using these niches you can carve out your own little piece of the web and do very well for yourself if you can pull it off.
Bad things about creating adult web sites
- Legal issues - As laws change you could find yourself needing to make changes to your site to keep it legal
- Web hosting - Most web hosting providers don’t allow adult content. Many of the hosts that do are low quality.
- Bandwidth use - Movies and pictures use a lot of bandwidth, which can cost a lot of money. You have to be careful to optimize your advertising and subscription services otherwise you may not be able to turn a profit.
- Lots of freeloaders - If you have image galleries hoping to get subscription signups you will find that you have huge number of visitors per signup compared to non-adult products. Most people like free porn and don’t want to pay for it.
- Highly competitive - There are a TON of adult sites out there. It is a highly competitive business and you will have a difficult time doing well unless you find a very specific niche to fill and focus on. There are a lot of multi-million dollar companies out there that can afford to spend a fortune on advertising without thinking twice. You have to be smart about it to beat them.
- Shady Webmasters - There a lot of less than ethical webmasters out there in the adult industry. They resort to black hat tactics and cheat on link exchanges. See my link exchange pitfalls article for more information about sleazy things you will find people doing when exchanging links.
- More difficult to promote - You will find yourself being extremely limited in who you can exchange links with. Most web directories don’t have adult sections. Even sites that are somewhat related to your adult one may not exchange links with adult sites. The other problem is you’ll be asking for links from your competition (those shady webmasters mentioned above), so they are often not really interested in cooperating with you.
I made what I feel was a mistake by having my first “making money online site” be an adult one. Since I didn’t know nearly as much those years ago as I do now this site took a very long time to take off. I have recently started up other (non-adult) sites and had them surpass the revenue of my oldest site after only a couple months. I do however plan to expand my adult portfolio in the near future.
It is a lot easier to create a non-adult site when first starting out, and branching out into adult content once you are comfortable with what is involved with web site creation and promotion. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t do it. If you are really motivated and want to create an adult site, by all means get started right now. Don’t let me change your mind. I just want you to know what you’re getting yourself into so you aren’t surprised.
~Wealthy Webmaster