I worked in porn years ago... ah the memories. I worked for one of the first companies doing live interactive video streaming from girls living at home, though "live" in the late 90's was a still image every 1-2 seconds and no audio. The girls were rolling full sized PCs with camcorders around on rolling carts in their houses. I learned a lot about managing high traffic, server push methods, etc. I know I came out of it with a lot of things I wouldn't have picked up elsewhere. I never found it to be a hindrance to getting work later.
I was the Director of Technology for Naughty America up until about 7 months ago when I transitioned to a "mainstream" job as those in the industry call it. Was definitely an interesting experience, but as others have said the things you learn about massive traffic, high availability, scalability and TONS of streaming video are hard to get anywhere else, unless you're working for a Google or Yahoo. Naughty America at one point was in the top 800 highest trafficked of all sites on the web, 1M+ uniques a day. I'm now the CTO of a startup and when I was leaving Naughty America everyone I interviewed with viewed that experience as an asset, as most intelligent people will.
www.gfy.com is the most popular adult webmaster forum, but there are others like www.justblowme.com, www.adultwhoswho.com, etc
Funny, these AHN's come up every few months or so. I wrote a good portion of the code and architecture for the kink.com sites. Decided to leave after 4 years working there pretty much because my job there was done, things work really well. Despite what people might think, it was not hard at all to find a 'real' job again as my experience working in extremely high traffic environments is desirable.
I've had mixed reactions when I mention it, but back then (2002ish) they paid my broke college-self infinitely better, and were doing stuff that was so far ahead of the "mainstream" clients wanting $200 all-flash sites.
I really regret not keeping in touch with those guys, aside from being able to show my mom what I work on now :D
Cool. I've been a member of the Kink site in the past and found it to be fast and well done. Did you just work on the back end stuff or did you also work on the design/layout of the site as well?
I did the backend stuff, but wrote a lot of the jsp pages as well. It is all Java/J2EE/JBoss/EJB3/Hibernate with some fairly complicated single sign on stuff going on to allow cross domain auto-login.
I work for Gamma Entertainment up here in Montreal. I handle the credit card processing side of things (TrustCharge). I won't rehash the places I've mentioned in other comments, but don't neglect actually meeting people. The trade shows are a great place to meet people, even if you don't get a booth.
Just keep in mind that the adult business is a business. The people involved are interested in making money.
On a side note, we are hiring programmers! Shoot me off an email if you're interested.
On the topic of getting a new job after leaving the adult industry:
It will generally have little impact on future jobs; especially if you get hands on experience with massively scalable architectures and high traffic volumes. The problems you solve outweigh the environment you worked in. From my experience, adult companies keep things professional due to the nature of the business and the risks of being sued.
I have a buddy that was in the industry for awhile, and there are a number of forums they all troll on. Here's a couple:
So for those of you that have worked on porn sites- why are they generally so poorly done (or at least, from the perspective that most HN coders would view as poorly).
Many have parts that are broken, they are slow, have really messy HTML, rely super heavily on flash, and just lack most modern features that most sites would have.
I've been dreaming of 'porn for geeks', where the content is the same, but there's nice RSS feeds, everything has strong semantic meaning, HTML5 is everywhere, they use jquery for consistent javascript rendering, the pages scale properly when you size them up, and hell... maybe even try for some user accessibility.
I just have yet to run across a good porn site that looks technically as impressive as someone's 4 hour rails project even. Of course, I wouldn't mind being proven wrong.
When working for Naughty America, I made a website for the members' area that was attempting to be like hulu for porn. Queueing, favorites, recommendations, subscriptions. We had it ready to go...
Naughty America was very resistant to change. The didn't want to divert all their members to a new site. They continued to work on their old members area so I was always feature chasing.
What it comes down to is that porn companies are not set up to be tech companies. They start out with 1 hacker that throws together some shitty CMS site and starts hacking content into it. Since the site quality isn't driving the money, they never lose the "one guy hacking on the site" mentality. They were basically doing everything as a one-off, without actually trying to make a good quality solution that would serve them long term.
I'll speak for the ones i've been dealing with (Pornhub.com, Brazzers.com, Keezmovies.com, XTube.com, and some other small ones).
Since i started at my company, i only did a website from scratch on one occasion (Videobash.com, not porn), and i think it was done right, it scales very well, using a framework we (me and an ex-colleague) designed and coded targeted for high traffic/high load needs. As for the other sites, i think people here summed it up pretty well, very often the decision are made by managers/marketing people, and we just can't spend the time we want to on optimization and good coding.
But, it's a situation that is starting to change, at least at my company, after a year or so of fighting, we finally started to rewrite all of our sites, using the proper technologies, structuring it correctly, using the framework that we did. You still have to keep in mind that the teams are very smalls, for example, Pornhub.com (17Millions visists/day, 3Billions+ pageviews per month) is maintained by 2 Programmers, and from time to time we can get our hands on an integrator, so understand that it's very hard to address all the issues. So even if, in the case of Pornhub, we were able to scale (since i joined this team) from 12Millions to 17Millions users with less hardware and better performance, i'm still far from being satisfied with the current state of the code.
But be sure, that personally i take the performance of my websites at heart. But there is also all the factors i can't control, advertisers to begin with, a lot of heavy crapy Flash/JavaScript.
The inherent flaw is that most people who actually pay for porn are not geeks, they are generally people who dont know the internet well enough to find porn for free.
Really, how often do you see these things on mainstream sites? Most developers who care about those things are fighting other developers or founders who continue to use the "We need to make money, not be standards compliant" argument.
When I give talks on accessibility, that's the #1 thing people say. THey can't be bothered to care because they believe that time could be better spent solving their business problems. They often truly believe that it's too costly, or that their target audience doesn't care.
And sometimes, they're spot on. Fact is, people come to web sites (not apps, but sites) for content. If it's wrapped in a crappy container, people tend to just deal with it, as long as the content is worth their time.
I would like to know what size of the audience of these porn websites are accessible users. Really.
Sometimes people who study accessibility get so harped up about it that it becomes a must for them to implement on almost everything they do regardless if the audience size may be minimal to none.
It's a dangerous thing just like an entrepreneur who is blinded by the fact that his idea is not useful and is not satisfying a need yet he still plugs away at it hoping one day a dollar may be extracted from his beliefs.
Step back and take a look at it realistically. You need to be effective and efficient.
In almost anything we do the majority outway the minority. And it should be.
When I think "porn for geeks", I think videos in which the slider is labeled by "act", so you can skip over the stuff that grosses you out (like watching blowjobs), or even avoid videos with that stuff altogether and zero in on videos that have the stuff you like in the largest ratio. I'm not a developer though. Sure, I threw together a tumblr site (http://lookAtThisFuckingSideboob.com), but I think it would be fun to help build and grow a proper [porn for hackers] site.
Hey tibbon, this is my first post on HN, but could not resist the urge to add to the thread.
My current position is Operations Manager at a company called Dreamstar Cash based in Altea (Spain), owned by Steve Matthyssen, a good friend of mine for many years.
Back in the day it all started with a TGP called gals4free.net. In Nov 2008 Dreamstar launched 4tube.com that is now ticking over with around 1.6M visits a day, 9 weeks ago we launched a new project PornTube.com that we're very excited about as we're using our existing tube model on a valuable/trusted/recognized domain that has historically outperformed/converted any other domain we've seen. Steve has built a solid reputation for himself over the years by not ripping off content. PornTube is 100% DMCA compliant, we believe the way forward is to work with, and not against the content producers.
Our current site has been designed with usability best practices in mind, as well as SEO (We're working with a highly reputable firm in the UK), scaleability, information architecture/semantics, MVT/CRO/LPO. Currently in the process of implementing rdf tags for some of our "starlettes" studios and movies, video sitemaps and dynamic rss feeds, social features...
As a small team it can be very hard to stay focused, develop all these features and ensure HA while managing +100k videos, security, performance and the list goes on. One of our goals for Q1 2011 is to review our SCRUM methodology and how we can improve our existing processes to stay on top of the game.
We worked VERY hard on setting ourselves a good foundation for growth, if there is any interest regarding the actual technologies used please forward your questions and I'll get our CTO to reply.
Nonetheless we do realise that their is much room for improvement, so any feedback would be very welcome, we're always looking to improve.
(We're also currently hiring ;-) feel free to pop over to http://www.dreamstarcash.com for more info or send your resume to jobs[at]dreamstarcash.com)
They are normally so poorly done because it does not matter. Most porn sites are either traffic sites or membership sites. If its a traffic site then the goal is just to upsell and send the user to another site and if its a membership site then the users care much more about the content than the site.
I think you're right. But at the same time, we know that Google is grading things on speed, and of course search engines love accessible sites (since they can read them easily too).
I can only speak for one company, but I believe the vast majority of traffic comes from affiliates and not search engines. I was pushing to do more SEO and SEM, but there was a fear that the affiliates would revolt if we started taking steps to cut them out (the industry standard is 60-70% revenue share from affiliate sales, good affiliates make a LOT of money).
Traffic sites == affiliate sites. @ aebn they have an entire traffic department that does nothing but throw up traffic (or affiliate) sites and drive traffic to their theaters. Also the pure affiliate model has been in decline for some time now. I also personally own about 10 traffic sites and each one has appox 10 affiliate offers on it. the term "Traffic site" has nothing to do with how the user gets to the site e.g.: organic search vs clicking link on 3rd party page. It simply refers to the purpose of the page which is to drive traffic to another site.
I've always wondered if sysadmin work for adult sites was a niche due to moral objections or the perception that employment at a "normal" place would be difficult afterwards. I don't often see many admin job postings for such sites, so I assume the industry is somewhat incestuous (no pun intended) and/or nepotist, resulting in more word-of-mouth job prospects than through the usual channels. Discretion and all that.
Anyone know where a freelance admin could find such jobs? The smaller the shop, the better.
When I got my job in the porn industry they didn't advertise that was what it was for. Instead it was brought up during the interview process.
They asked me a series of questions related to it as well. Like "For your day job you may have to visit bigblackcocks.com to make sure their website is functioning again, how do you feel about that?" and "We host a lot of content that might be offensive, if given root access would feel the urge to delete everything because it didn't fit in with your world view?"
I'm not offended at anything, so it really didn't bother me. I worked on many different aspects of the business. Massively scaling MySQL, handling DDoS attacks, setting up load balancers on the fly, helping figure out how certain websites were attacked and or compromised. It was a fun job, and one of the sites I worked on currently has 600+ live models streaming to over 1 million unique IP addresses.
I don't know how you'd go about finding such a job, I stumbled upon it. No, it is not on my resume since I am a software engineer at heart and not a sys admin, but the knowledge I have gained has allowed me to engineer various different systems in the mean time.
CCBill and Cave Creek located in Phoenix are two of the places where I interviewed before landing the other job, later I found out through a friend who did get the job at Cave Creek that he was doing the same stuff I was doing.
It happened while I worked there. It was a site that featured 18 year old girls that looked like they were underage. It was the guys third week on the job and while he had no issues with bestiality or anything along those lines he felt that a line had been crossed with hosting "child porn" even-though we had the records on file that said the women were all over the age of 18.
There is a reason we kept backups, and why the new guys (myself included in the first 4 months) were only allowed access on load-balanced systems so that if we did go rogue the downtime would be minimal while the more senior admins flipped a switch.
Related to this, I'd love to see developers who work on porn sites speaking at conferences, to hear about your particular experiences in design, marketing, SEO, hosting, and scaling. Seems like you'd have an interesting perspective on all that.
I always got the impression most tech conferences were too thin-skinned about the subject, which is sad considering the porn industry works on a lot of interesting tech problems.
There was one talk called "Tits Bits" at the Chaos Communication Camp 07 (a rather unconventional but awesome tech conference). It was about the technical challenges of operating a porn streaming website. You can download the recording (number 2041) here: http://dewy.fem.tu-ilmenau.de/CCC/CCCamp07/video/m4v/
The recording includes some pictures which make it not safe for work (depending on your work environment).
Probably should create a throwaway for this :) but way back in college I did a bit of contract front-end web work for some guys in that area, email me (in profile) and I can send you the URL of the message board they were all on.
http://gofuckyourself.com (NWS) is pretty much the hangout for adult affiliates and webmasters. If you're trying to build traffic, that's where you want to be.
Funny enough, I seem to be at it again. My latest client is a porn startup.
Nothing fancy, just a new porn studio. After the basic stuff is up and running we're going to talk about making it all whiz-bang.
I still have dreams about getting the "iTunes Store for Porn" idea up and running again, since there was a lot of interest from other companies about getting their content on there (I think it's the best way to save the industry from the proliferation of free porn). Plus, with the technical/marketing/mobile knowledge I've gained since then I can make it a million times better.
Unfortunately, without the content and resources of Naughty America behind me it would be tough to break away from client work long enough to build something that I could pimp out to content producers.
My experience with the domain has been less than stellar. I ended up being fired for handing over a petition from all but one employee asking for better treatment. I sued them and they settled out of court.
The best part of it was the "best orgasm faces" contest we had. I was a programmer so I just benefited from it but those working on touch ups would screenshot and save the orgasm faces into a shared network drive and we had new stuff to laugh at every day.
Long long long time ago back in the days of dial up ISPs, I along with friends created a website called Kandyland. We bought a negative film scanner for about $1500 or so for a photographer in return for a 2 year supply of naked women photos.
About 4 months later we got a cease and deist letter from Hasbro asking us not to use the term Kandyland as it was too similar to Candyland the game.
Being young and not exactly flush with VC money, we simply changed it to California Babes or something like that.
Eventually after about one and half years, our girlfriends asked us if we are going to make this a career or not? We picked our girlfriends and have left the business altogether. The experience did help my web development career though.
I did a bunch of work for a porn site back in the 90's who somehow managed to not pay me. Something like $6000 down the drain. (So my wife was mad at me twice over that one. Sigh.)
I made http://pix-plz.com . I originally set out to make a site that was easier to use than hotornot.com (a lot of people just rate all photos the same, because they want to see more.)
The site has languished, as I'm not really sure what to do with it, but I'm proud of the features I implemented, the UI, and the things I learned in doing it.
I worked for livejasmin (and the sister sites), some years ago, I think it was the biggest live streaming sites even back then.
Unfortunately, I wasn't a coder then, just support staff, but it was a great experience and I learnt some things about how they run a multimillion dollar biz from a basement.
Got a view on everything from creditcard processing, to the sysadmin side. And of course dealing with performers and customers was always fun, as they are not that usual people.
Still remember a "crazy stuff" folder, where we used to collect the funny moments.
Yep that's me.
I've been working for Manwin for the past 3 years and a half. Worked on almost every projects they've done.
For the past 2 years, i've been involved specifically on the tube sites, Pornhub.com and other ones.
I am currently Lead Developer, and like my job, like others stated in this thread, it's a great occasion to work on high traffic websites, solving scalability issues, and a lot of interesting stuff.
I had a dabble a few years ago. There was a strong community on a couple of IRC channels.
I saw the potential for seriously automated stuff, but sadly when I went to Uni it all fell by the wayside. Got back into it a little after, but lost interest: it had got a lot harder to get converting traffic in the 5 years between the first dabble and later.
Now everyone wants video. That's gotta be a killer on your bandwidth bills.
Personally working in the adult industry is a little awkward in the beginning but after that it's fairly rewarding. Personally I found it really useful to get the high traffic/high scalability experience. I mean you don't get too many job opportunities where you can brag about your app serving around a billion page views/day.
I work tangentially to porn in adult toys for about six years. Built an affiliate program, retail sites, wholesale sites and various other stuff. Don't really interact with developers in the business, though (outside of some time on GFY before I stopped caring).
I'm not kidding here, gofuckyourself.com is generally considered the most popular porn webmaster forum online. I've heard the quality has dropped in recent times though.
I feel a strong non-rational urge to write "hacker news is turning into reddit", and then rush off to reddit to write "reddit is turning into digg" on any-and-every thread, and so on.
I have worked in adult for 9+ years and sold 2 sites. aebn.com / stockroom.com / domme.com etc... One of the sites i sold was called cameraphoneporn.com; sold it 8 years ago before mobile was big.
IMHO the best thing about working in adult is that you gain a good understanding of affiliates and seo / marketing / conversion rates etc... and that is information that has helped me with my mainstream clients as well.
and the HN code that truncates long urls chopped it in the middle of & so it becomes "" which is telling your browser to print the ascii character 3, which it can't show properly, so it shows the character you see instead.
