[sarettah]

Originally Posted by Hell Puppy

Such a nice little topic to beat around but instead it immediately degrades into participants questioning each other's expertise and authority.

I like the topic, so I'll comment even though as hammer will point out I never say anything that everyone doesn't already know.

The question itself is almost a contradiction, ethics and porn. The average person on the street in the U.S. would say selling porn is unethical. And bottom line it is a skeezy industry filled with skeezy characters. There are some business people here, those are the ones who are still thriving. But there are also a fair amount of people who for one reason or another would never fit in a 9-5 corporate world. There's also a lot of greed and people who are here because it's still easier money than mainstream web.

Bottom line, ethics do not weigh into many porn business plans. To be competitive you've got to push the edge of the envelop as much as you can get away with. The decision as to whether to do something like spam isn't usually based upon right or wrong but rather whether or not the juice is worth the squeeze. Will you go to jail? Will you get fined? Will the returns outweight the fine? Will my host shut me down? Can I find a chinese server to relay off of? These are the questions, not whether it is ethical.

Now in a perfect world where selling porn was no different than selling baseball caps online, you would be worried more about things like branding, company image, customer satisfaction and loyalty, repeat business, providing value, etc. I can guarantee you those type discussions are rarely had around porn boardtoom tables.

In that world you'd do none of the above, you want your surfers, err customers, to trust you.

There are some pay sites and genres that do this once you reach the sanctity of the pay site. That is a marketing model in and of itself. "Come in out of the wild, it's safe here". Give me $nn per month, i'll let you spank your monkey without without worrying about whether I've changed your home page, installed a tool bar and now I'm going to pop 20 windows everytime you click anything.

Don't you have that sitting to cut and paste by now

You have stated that before and I agree completely