Note: This content was originally written by Titimowse ("The Professor") and published on the old Cozyacademy.com over 10 years ago, a site that is no longer live and, as a result, the great wealth of knowledge it provides for the adult webmasters community was nearly lost. I recovered this article from an old archive and no part of this work belongs to me. I republished it here for the benefit of the adult community.

For those who believe those mythical stories of adult webmasters that work two hours a day and make buckets of money, perhaps online porn is not for you. If ever there was a time that making money from selling smut was easy, that time is gone.

According to Online Computer Library Center, there are almost 80,000 adult websites in existence and that number grows every day. Taking into account that the OCLC’s statistics weed out multiple sites coming from one IP, there are many more adult sites on the net than their numbers indicate. The point being is that a new member of the adult webmastering community enters in at the end of a very long line of established sites and professional competitors.

Stress related complaints cry out in adult webmaster message boards. There’s talk of twenty-hour days and lack of social lives among these weary smut peddlers. They tell of endless time online updating, uploading and upselling and still there’s more to be done. There are layouts to tweak and trades to maintain, email to answer and content to buy. Even with all the hustling and promoting and gallery building, not all adult webmasters make a fortune. In fact, you’ll find that many of them work diligently on their adult ventures on top of regular day jobs. Yes, sex sells and yes it sells even better on the Internet but a whole bunch of capable and bright people already are taking advantage of this knowledge and they are your peers.

Almost every adult webmaster works every day at their business. A gallery builder makes one or more galleries each day and submits them to sometimes hundreds of TGPs. The TGP site owner has to review and update their listings daily. A single free site owner works all the time updating and marketing their site with link trades, promotional galleries and search engine submissions. The paysite owner usually has to hire employees to help them perform the tasks involved in maintaining a subscription-based web. They all toil long and hard because every one else is.

How many hours a day should you spend on your adult venture? The answer to that is relative to the project involved and the ability of the webmaster. If you know very little or nothing at all about HTML, then you will need to learn. There are WYSIWYG web page editors where the user can drag and drop elements that are saved as HTML files, but they are not perfect and you have to understand HTML code to fix discrepancies. If you don’t know what HTML or WYSIWYG are then that means you should definitely familiarize yourself with the computer language used to build web files and the software with which to create them. The learning doesn’t stop there. You are going to have to become knowledgeable about many things in the adult Internet. You will need to be a designer, a content manager, a media technologist, a marketing engineer and more than anything, an innovator. Used to be a person could open an adult website with any old nudie pictures and a few video clips and they would makes good sales. Nowadays a typical paysite has gigabytes and gigabytes of content that is multiplied hundreds-fold in transfer rates. A free site has to fight for search engine placement by establishing a name-brand presence through endless promotion. The AVS and TGP gallery builder has to regularly build and submit new pages and hope their intended targets pick them up. All of them spend untold hours shopping for content and new sponsors, checking site statistics, reworking text links and gallery descriptions and responding to emails.

The fact is if you had the most powerful and popular smut site on the Internet and you suddenly shut it down, online porn would still continue and thrive without you. Before the Internet came along, owning or being involved in adult entertainment ventures required massive amounts of capitol and the ability to withstand public scorn. Now almost any individual with an Internet connection can sit down in front of their computer in their home and become an adult webmaster. The Internet has opened a door to a whole new way of commerce and the adult market is it’s most reliable. The concern for the new adult webmaster is that there are thousands of other adult webmasters far ahead of you in the game and you have a lot of catching up to do.

Most adult Internet professionals these days will tell you they had to work intensively for at least six moths before they saw their first profits. Some never make enough to justify the hours and quit. Others are weeded out by the work itself. The ones that stay in it, the ones who succeed are the ones that put in the hours and the effort. They are the ones willing to learn and willing to listen. They are the ones who keep their promises and promote their wares honestly. The adult webmaster who understands that their business is like any other and that easy money is a fantasy will be the success story of the future.