Financial Issues

The Businesses of Pornography and Filtering

"Making money? Well, I'm not getting rich, but the site generally carries around 200 active members or so. You can do the math, it works out to around $1400 to $1600 a month," claims Mike Jones, a part-time web pornographer. His small-scale pay site purveys X-rated photographs for a monthly subscription of $8.95. With $1,800 in monthly revenue and only $500 to $600 in expenses, his profit margins are high

Jones pays Adult Candy Web Hosting an average of $30 per month for bandwidth. Other expenses include licensing material, film and photo processing, the occasional model fee, and a local ISP account. Jones says 75 percent of his site's income comes from membership sales. The rest comes from referrals to Adult Verification Systems, such as AdultCheck and PornoPass.

Corey Kayfes posted his first porno site in June 1998 with a minimal investment of time and money. He was in the black after only three months. Kayfes' sites are free to viewers. He makes money with click-throughs, mouse clicks on banner ads that send readers to subscription sites. His pay is based on how many of his visitors actually purchase services from his advertisers. Kayfes also receives commissions on sales of a streaming-video service linked at his site. With the click-throughs and the commission, Kayfes says his income averages $4,000 a month. "If you match the right click-through program to the page, the little guy does still have a chance," he said.

from Wired News, Nov 1998 by Becky Bond

Seth Warshavsky is the hugely successful CEO of the Internet Entertainment Group, an adult content provider. Warshavsky claims that IEG grossed $50 million in 1997, its third year in operation.

Filter Pricing

Filtering Software vendors have developed their pricing schemes along different lines. This list of vendors (with links to their sites) and brief listing of pricing schemes will give you a better idea of the kind of investment those interested in blocking, monitoring, or protecting are being asked to make.

Web Willy Watch

This vendor sells Single-Family Licenses for $20.00.

"For schools, churches, and synagogues, the Every Family license enables a qualifying institution to distribute Web Willy Watch to the families it serves. A school, PTA, or student group may purchase an every-family license for $159.00 and distribute copies of the software to the parents of all students who attend the school. Similarly, a church or synagogue may purchase an every-family license for $159.00 and provide copies to every family in a congregation or parish. Web Willy Watch may be placed on a church, synagogue, school, or personal web site as a method of distribution to families." -Web willy website

Businesses, agencies, and other organizations may obtain an Every-Family License - with the vendor's permission to distribute copies of the software to all employees. If the business has fewer than 100 employees, the product costs $159. Larger businesses are asked to contact the vendor for pricing information.

AltaVista Family Filter

This vendor is the popular search engine, AltaVista.

Feature that you can use when you're searching AltaVista, but only when searching. Does not protect your general web-browsing. The family filter is provided by AltaVista to its users free of charge.

Heads Up

This Internet Service Provider (ISP) acts as a filtering service to its customers.

Reasons to Choose a Filtered ISP Service (excerpted from the Heads Up site):