My biggest challenge of that time was reliable billing. That said, it wasn't quite as bad as you make it out to be. When you have a long history of low chargebacks you can make some deals, and even then there were a few options. We always had a few processors integrated at any one time because 1) any processor could pull the plug on us with minimal notice and 2) these organizations tended to be technologically inept and their platforms were not reliable.
Some payments we processed through our own merchant account. We tried to get more merchant accounts and were unsuccessful. It's difficult because (IIRC) banks only allow a certain percentage of their total volume to be "high risk" and porn is in that bucket no matter how low your chargeback rate is and how long you've been established. It's something you could probably arbitrage profitably if you were a bank, but by the time you get to be a big enough bank you are bound into the stodgy culture of banking ("ewww porn").
That ship has sailed however; there's not much money in porn anymore. The tube sites have killed the content business; this is a shrinking industry. I agree, the content is better than it ever has been before, and you can get it free... uploaded to tube sites by the very producers themselves, hoping to get exposure.
> That ship has sailed; there’s not much money in porn anymore
That’s interesting, and would be the very reason small creators would move to a patreon backed model. The logic is similar to how youtube and podcast creators diversify to patreon as the platform revenue can’t be counted on.
Also the impact of Patreon’s policy goes beyond porn, to take an extreme example, educational content involving sex in any graphic way would also get banned.
I wonder what happens next. Would moving to direct peer to peer payment with a one to one link between the creator and the “customer” be a workaround ? Then when volumes get big enough there would be ashakedown again ?
While content sites are not doing well, live cams have nowadays quite a high turnover. However all you said regarding merchants and banks is still an issue, payment processors get quite a large chunk of the pie. I’d also add Epoch to the dominant billers besides CCBill.
Hopefully the crypto world will mature in the upcoming years and people will use it for payments. That would help customers stay anonymous and there will be no charge-backs. Sure, we will miss recurring payments but still a win imo.
Source: I’m the CTO of a mid-sized live cam platform.
There is actually a really interesting story behind this that was once on HN, I unfortunately can't find it anymore but it has something to do with the following process:
1. New content creator enters market.
2. Content gets uploaded to tube sites constantly, take-downs are intentionally slow and ineffective to make this process as tiresome and inefficient as possible.
3. New creator is eventually forced to upload the content themselves in order to generate leads and collect some revenue although this is very little.
4. This revenue is not and was never planned to be enough for the creator, two options:
A. Quality of content and models is reduced in order to reduce costs and remain profitable.
B. This does not happen, studio struggles to stay afloat and is forced to sell, it gets acquired by guess who... the parent company of the tube site.
I probably got some things wrong so feel free to correct me!
Are you comfortable with sharing what are the main tech stacks in there? PHP, Ruby, Python, something else? Which frameworks?
As an example of something I heard at least a year ago back here in HN: I get it that PHP can be secure and fast but that requires a lot of extra effort and I'd bet most sites don't want their programmers to work more because they will have to pay more?
(I am skeptical if porn sites even keep fulltime programmers on a wage; I'd bet they just hire them periodically.)
...Or am I missing something very obvious here and talking uninformed? I am curious.
I am not asking about site names or anything identifiable; just the tech side of things.
Lots of php mostly. A bit of node. We use python but we are small players.
The fun thing is more about the db. E.g some go full in memory redis while others stay on a good old mysql.
Although, don't let yourself fooled by the poor ui. It doesn't reflect the tech behind, and is now mostly ugly for marketting reasons.
Big sites makes millions and of course have full time dev team. They need to innovate constantly. E.g provide best moments on the player timeline, add face recognition to categorize actors, buff the infra for live cams, etc.
However, very few use the cloud. It's mostly home made. Video streaming is expensive, and you can divide your costs by 10 by avoiding aws and cie.
They are smart for using their own metal. I am still waiting the world at large to recognize the fact that the popular cloud services are not actually cost-efficient at all.
I sometimes wondered if I should try and work in the area; these people seem to constantly have to do stuff better and better which is an appealing aspect for me and keeps me from being bored. And as more and more time passes, I don't care for societal approval. Plus I never viewed porn as a "sin" or whatever.
Thank you.
Also, are you folks open to something newer in terms of stacks? Something much more efficient and fast out of the box, like Go or Erlang/Elixir? Is the legacy too big for a code reorganization to ever be viable?
Even though parent is true, don't get the picture that it's just PHP/MySQL. I've seen and written Lua code on top of Openresty for a custom CDN authorization layer fe. Also Node is getting more and more common.
The problem with Go and the like is that you shoot yourself in the foot regarding recruiting. An exotic tech stack really narrows the already small pool of people willing to work for an adult company.
I understand that the adult companies' hiring pool is even smaller and I recognize it as a legitimate business problem to worry about.
But aren't these companies of the kind that like to nurture employees as a result? Namely good social programs, maybe some free food, some advertise good parties (wtf?) or maybe none of these -- just a promise for job stability and having a friendly and outgoing team and a "family"-like environment overall.
Regarding parties: I watched a video years ago when 2 of an adult site's programmers went to a company party and they were very pampered, including voluntary flirting and sex by some of the porn stars (that was a bit weird but also kind of hot). While as a very happily taken man I don't care about such activities in company parties one bit, this is one of the examples of a smaller community that has tighter bonds and (overly) friendly atmosphere.
I mean, not everybody is obsessed by growth and being able to replace humans as nuts and bolts in a machine, after all.
I believe the biggest player is MindGeek and they have a lot of open positions in various locations [0]. Technologies include Go, PHP, .Net, JS (React) and there are lots of DevOps positions too.
My biggest challenge of that time was reliable billing. That said, it wasn't quite as bad as you make it out to be. When you have a long history of low chargebacks you can make some deals, and even then there were a few options. We always had a few processors integrated at any one time because 1) any processor could pull the plug on us with minimal notice and 2) these organizations tended to be technologically inept and their platforms were not reliable.
Some payments we processed through our own merchant account. We tried to get more merchant accounts and were unsuccessful. It's difficult because (IIRC) banks only allow a certain percentage of their total volume to be "high risk" and porn is in that bucket no matter how low your chargeback rate is and how long you've been established. It's something you could probably arbitrage profitably if you were a bank, but by the time you get to be a big enough bank you are bound into the stodgy culture of banking ("ewww porn").
That ship has sailed however; there's not much money in porn anymore. The tube sites have killed the content business; this is a shrinking industry. I agree, the content is better than it ever has been before, and you can get it free... uploaded to tube sites by the very producers themselves, hoping to get exposure.