Help with starting a new site

Webmaster Discussion
#1

Hello guys. I am in the process of starting a new paysite. The site will have videos of me servicing str8 regular guys. I am NEW to all the the technicalities of websites and web design. I have some questions on how to get started.

I will start with 20 different guys/videos to start. Do you think this is enough?

What is a fair price to pay for a website like spunkworthy, militaryclassified, straightboyz.net ect?

Does anyone know of a reputable web disigner capable of designing a site like that?

What are webmasters?

What is an affiliate program? How does it work? I will be using CCBILL.

What kind of problems can I expect in running a website?

All my videos are HD 1080p. What kind of hosting plan should I use?

I know I need to disclose 2257, privacy policy, and terms of use. Where do I get the wording for those statements? Do I just copy and paste them from other sites? Some of the terms of use statements are long and complex. How do I know what my terms of use is?

What else should I know about starting a website?

Your input is greatly appreciated

#2

Re: Help with staring a new site

You can check out AdultSiteRunner.com as we will literally provide you the entire package. All you need is a CCBill or epoch account and we can help you with the rest. You might consider 25 as a minimum to launch with and add 2 scenes per month. The rest we can talk to you about offline.

With us, you don’t need to know any web design or tech info.

Starting a new site can be overwhelming and expensive. But it doesn’t need to be.

Happy holidays!

#3

Re: Help with staring a new site

Welcome Str8madetocum

Sounds like you are starting up from scratch, so let me say right off the bat, that you should never accept any advice, from one source, including me. Always, and I mean ALWAYS get as many opinions, answers as possible, and DO NOT RUSH INTO ANYTHING before doing your Due Diligence.

There are a lot of very helpful people in this industry, but also there are a lot of quick buck scam artists out there. SO BEWARY OF ANYTHING THAT SOUNDS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE, odds are, it is just that, too good to be true.

Webmaster = The person who runs your website, manages the updates, the technical side of things. It can be anyone, including yourself.

Affiliate Program = This is basically where “affiliates” sign up to help promote your site, for a fee. Most sites offer revenue sharing option, at around 50%. Simply put, the get promotional material from your ‘affiliate area’ and try to sell it to their viewers.

Affiliate = This is any person who has their own website, who will market your site for a fee. You have to be careful, and spell out your terms too, so their is no misunderstandings. Thing of them as SalesPersons, who work for a myriad of companies. They make money by selling your goods, but you have to provide them with the tools to do that.

[INDENT]For the most part, that means at least 15 to 20 decent images, video trailer (usually around the 1 to 2 minute mark) and banners.[/INDENT]

As to the privacy and other legal stuff, DO NOT LISTEN TO THE AVERAGE JOE. Seek out professional help from a qualified lawyer who specializes in adult related online goods. They will tell you what you can and cannot do, what you need. Failure to do so, can simply get you behind bars, or at the least, bankrupt you.

This is a business, not a hobby, despite what many might say. It requires proper business practises, and that means a good lawyer, a decent accountant, because if you think starting up a site, is all it takes to have the cash rolling in, well, forget it. It doesn’t work that way.

You have to update your site, frequently, otherwise why should anyone bother to join it? or promote it? Most sites like Spunkworthy do one update a week, some more. Yes, some do it less often, but they have a lot less people promoting their sites, because you simply aren’t the only fish in the sea.

Don’t get wrapped up into fancy crap either, as they cost a ton of money, and frankly they simply don’t add much to the revenue stream, least not at the beginning.

You need a decent host, that will deliver your site quickly, if designed right, and will keep it online. Going cheap on that can cost you a lot, in both sales, and money.

There is a lot to learn, but it doesn’t mean you have to know all the various tech stuff, but you do need to know what is involved. You need to have some knowledge of things like html, css, encoding videos, and other goodies. Sure, you can hire people to do it, but you need to have SOME knowledge, to insure the people you hire aren’t scammers and actually do know their stuff.

ASK QUESTIONS UNTIL YOU ARE BLUE IN THE FACE, THEN ASK MORE QUESTIONS. It is the only real way to understand this business, and have some smattering of knowledge. It is also how you can protect your ass, from being roasted by the less than honest sort, and they do exist, just as good people do as well.

[INDENT]There are a lot of things to consider BEFORE you open your doors. Like will you offer video streaming and downloading? Some people prefer to download the videos, and they aren’t a minority either. Some simply don’t care. Some like large HD photographs to go with their viewing, some don’t care if they are super sized or not. So you see, there is a lot you have to decide, BEFORE you open the doors, otherwise you have to play catch up.[/INDENT]

In short, THIS IS A BUSINESS and you need to approach it as such. RUSHING or JUMPING WITHOUT LOOKING will only get you into trouble. A lot of small start ups are failing, for that reason, and even some of the bigger fish are struggling too. So be wary, be alert, and as I said ASK LOTS OF QUESTIONS BEFORE DOING ANYTHING.

There are a ton of helpful people and people who know how to get it right, like the guy at Spunkworthy, like the guy at GayHoopla, BoysHalfwayHourse, FrenchTwinks, and others. Ask them, go to various sites and ask them their opinions. The more people you ask, the more you will learn. Plus, you know the old adage, “put two people in a room, ask them a question, and get three answers, or more”. So ask and keep on asking, then you have to decide, but at least you will be deciding based on some intelligent insights. BUT ONLY IF YOU ASK A LOT OF QUESTIONS.

Hope that helps

Ian

#4

Re: Help with starting a new site

I would say that the answer to most of your questions would be “Google is your friend”, or in other words the info you need is already out there if you search for it. Forums like this are best for very specific questions or problems that might pop up where the experts here can try to help. Make sure you also visit some of the adult website forums visited by mostly straight porn webmasters when doing your research. Most of the advice for starting a straight porn site applies to gay ones.

Good luck with your site. The straight guy massage/handjob niche has always been fairly successful so if you can find hot guys you should do well. I see that a domain with your user name has already been purchased but nothing is on the site yet. Assuming this is your site you may want to just throw up a Wordpress “coming soon” site where you can request the email address of visitors, then when you’re ready to launch you may have a bunch of potential customers.

By the way, nothing against Teddy but I think Adult Site Runner at $399 a month is way too pricey for someone just starting out. Check out Elevated X for a basic plan that is good for newbies, only $89 a month.

#5

Re: Help with starting a new site

I think 20 videos is a good place to start and so is $19.95 a month, which you’ll want to label at a limited-time, opening special and noting that the price will be locked in but will increase to $24.95 in six months. Nothing like urgency to generate sales.

I agree with naked that Adult Site Runner is pricey at $399 a month, but they also give the flexibility of monthly memberships and extra download revenues. I’ve been seeing some nice larger sale amounts from Hot Older Male, which was always a good seller for me. But perhaps you can negotiate an introductory agreement with them and get a lower price for the first six months until you get your site off the ground. Remember, in this business, nothing is carved in stone.

And regardless of what some will say, you still need affiliates to get your site off the ground, unless you have a gazillion dollars to buy banner ads all over the place.

#6

Re: Help with starting a new site

Hello Str8madetocum and welcum to the board.

As a startup site, you might want to consider an affiliate program managing and running your site. Why? There is no “out of pocket” cost to you in terms of $$$. Only the time it takes to upload your content to a server.

No hosting cost to you.
No merchant account required.
No CCBill, Epoch, Segpay, etc., billing companies to deal with.
No web design cost to you.

With our program, ZbuckZ.com, you actually have no need to edit your videos unless you prefer doing so. You just upload the raw footage and we’ll handle the editing, make promotional trailers, make photo sets from screen grabs if you don’t have professional type pictures, do the write up for the scene and promote to affiliates through our newsletters.

In this type of business partnership, all you need to be concerned with is shooting content and let our team handle it from there.

Profits are split between you and our company. It’s “zero cost” to you to get a site up and running and start making sales.

There are plenty of other companies available to you for this scenario. You might want to consider this as another option.

#7

Re: Help with starting a new site

Thanks for all the info guys! There is a lot to consider. I want to do this the right way and I’ll gladly take all your input. I know my site should do well. I have over 100,000 views on xtube in only 5 months (profile has been up for 7) You guys can check out samples of my videos at xtube/madetocum1. To Naked yes I already purchased the domain name

#8

Help with starting a new site

Also, str8madetocum, keep in mind that a large percentage of the guys posting here do not run their own pay sites, nor do they produce videos. Many are affiliates here and don’t have experience as site owners in that respect. There are a few that do post like Jason at Spunkworthy but keep that in mind when taking advice. Everyone means well of course, but not all advice is experienced advice as content producers.

I’m not only a rep for ASR, I’ve also had my own porn brand for 7 years and now run 2 sites, our owner has been a producer with his own brand for over twice as long and runs a network of at least 7 sites. So we not only sell a product for the porn industry, we also are part of it and we keep up to date on it because we also need to for our own interests.

Getting the site set up with us would not be difficult, however you need traffic to your site and that can be hard. Affiliates that are willing to promote you will be very helpful.

As for updates, for a new site in a niche like yours twice a month is perfectly fine. Pushing yourself and your wallet to go to once a week or more is over kill. You aren’t a huge porn studio and you don’t have that kind of budget. Just making good strong quality content and being consistent is where it’s more important.

As for others opinion on our pricing. Well, let’s just say for everything you get with us it’s a very fair deal and we are running some specials. I can discuss that with you should you choose to contact me.

Have a great day.

#9

Re: Help with starting a new site

Question to start up packages like Adult siterunner and Zbuckz… So basically you are saving me the start up costs and hassle of running a site? Would I be paying a lot more in the long run since its a monthly thing? Couldnt I just pay the $700-$1200 for a custom site and become the webmaster along with having an Affiliate page on my site and only worry about the hosting fees?

#10

Re: Help with starting a new site

My advice as a site owner and a content producer is to not take the advice of anyone on this site :smiley: We’re just a bunch of talking heads and 99% of us have a vested interest in selling you something.

  1. You can probably do it all yourself if you sketch out what you need and check those things off your own list.

  2. I make around $4 on every $25 sale because I did not choose to do it all myself. If I didn’t have creative ways of monetizing the content, I would not survive.

  3. If Teddy can give you the $400 package at $100 per month, it might be worth it.

BUT again, that is me giving you advice and you should not accept our advice :smiley:

#11

Re: Help with starting a new site

Our ASR service is actually $847/month for the fully loaded option. This includes hosting, CDN streaming with one of the worlds best CDN networks, software that runs the site, security, and features that no other CMS has to make more money from your content. We do have some specials for brand new sites though if you contact me off here.

With us you literally have no other fees to physically run your site besides what CCBill charges.

If you are just playing around and not serious about making the most money you can from your site then by all means install a wordpress template and dump money into programmers or web designers that may or may not steal your money or disappear on you.

If you want to actually be able to monetize your content properly and have your site run properly worldwide and not be taken in by crooks and shady people then look me up.

This will be my last post to this thread though because as it has been said previously, many on here just like to pose and argue and try and measure the size of their cocks instead of really look out for people’s best interest.

I was a start up just like you 7 years ago and I run a niche site so I’ve been down the road you are getting ready to embark on. We are happy to help you, if you desire. If not, best of luck.

Feel free to ask a sampling of our customers how they like us. Some are large and iconic brands like COLT or BoundJocks.com, some smaller and niche like blackboyaddictionz.com or theguysite.com or even boyshalfwayhouse.com

We stand behind our work and our system and our customers make on average 30% more money than they do on other systems or platforms.

We are a CCBill Premiere Partner, we are the best at monetizing adult video and we have the numbers to prove it.

#12

Re: Help with starting a new site

[QUOTE=Adult SiteRunner Teddy;164659] Feel free to ask a sampling of our customers how they like us. Some are large and iconic brands like COLT or BoundJocks.com, some smaller and niche like blackboyaddictionz.com or theguysite.com or even boyshalfwayhouse.com
We stand behind our work and our system and our customers make on average 30% more money than they do on other systems or platforms. [/QUOTE]

Colt have about 80k unique visitors/month, and Boundjocks only have about 20k unique visitors/month, I am surprised that someone can call them large brands.

In 2015, Colt and TGS only got half traffic of what they had in 2014. How come ASR members can make on average 30% more money than they do on other systems or platforms? It sounds ridiculous.

I have been promoting those sites for a long time. Their sales are generally ok before they use ASR. But the sales of most of those sites have a nose dive after they moved to ASR platform. Boyshalfwayhouse sells good though. But they were already on ASR when I started to promote them.

#13

Re: Help with starting a new site

I’m not trying to sell you anything and I have run my own paysite before.

Doing it all yourself is a nice idea, and many do, but there’s a lot involved in running a site – most of us never dreamed of all the stuff that had to be done until it showed up once we hit the “on” button.

So ask yourself this: Why are you wanting to run a porn site and what is your core competency, that is, what are the things that you’re best at and that you love doing. So let’s say for the sake of argument that producing the videos is what you enjoy most and you’re best at. Once you become a site owner, you’ll be taking on a whole bunch of tasks and many of these you will not only enjoy, but they’ll be taking away time from the stuff you do enjoy.

Once you’re a site owner you’ll be taking on the responsibility of producing the content and all the stuff that entails like finding models, paperwork, filming, editing, finding locations, etc.; then with the site you have the membership processing and all the billing issues like watching for fraud and dealing with member questions; then there’s affiliates and providing them with all the tools they need and want, dealing with their emails, and talking to them at places like this; and then there’s the issue of theft and what are you going to do about pirates stealing your content.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. You can’t do everything yourself, nor should you – trying to do it all is a sure way of ending up hating your job and life and burning out. So if you’re not a good writer, why struggle for two hours trying to write a scene description when you could pay a writer to do it? Maybe you suck at video editing or perhaps you’re a lousy designer. Maybe you don’t want to talk to affiliates or dealing with member emails.

Let’s say that you buy this custom design and start running the site yourself, do you know how to customize it? Do you know how to take care of all the problems that pop up from time to time? So yes, you’ve saved yourself long-term monthly costs, but how about when you have to spend a whole day chasing down a solution for while the dingle bot module stopped working on your content management system. It’s much easier to pop off an email: “Hey Bob, my dingle bot is broken, can you fix it?” And he does that while you go off and make another video.

Yes, in the beginning we all have to do stuff that we don’t like or want to be doing, but if you can afford to offload some of those responsibilities, it’ll the wear and tear on your spirit and well being.

#14

Re: Help with starting a new site

I see. Decisions decisions. Greatly appreciate everyone’s input. I just want to bang str8 guys and make good porn n’ make LAMBO money all at the same time is really what it comes down to 😎

#15

Re: Help with starting a new site

I’m not in the area of making media, I stick to the marketing, writing and promotion side of things, but from my experience I can add that you shouldn’t use Xtube views as a measure of potential success.

The tube sites can be a great way to find niches that aren’t saturated with paysites, and I think from that perspective you are on the right track with a str8-serviced theme (as long as the models are actually hot and not clearly crack addicts desperate for a quick $20, which has been done, and quickly failed). It’s important to remember that tubes are free sites, and people use them because they don’t want to pay for porn.

So, you have to wonder how many of those 100,000 views would actually pay for anything. Chances are most of them are there on Xtube because they have no intention of actually paying for anything.

It would be better if you had a Twitter following, that would be an indication of how dedicated a following might be for a paysite. I worked with one performer who had made a few videos for other sites and had a genuine following on Twitter, over 14k, with every tweet getting plenty of feedback. For an “amateur” straight guy only known for making soft-core and never promoting himself professionally that was pretty impressive. When he announced he was going to start making his own videos and create his own site thousands of them responded.

Unfortunately he never did, he vanished from Twitter shortly after that. But even now whenever I tweet anything about him I get people contacting me asking for information, what he’s doing, whether he’s still making videos, where they can find him…

As mentioned there are companies out there ready to help you out, but I would say be very suspicious about companies demanding hundreds of $'s up-front. If they have belief in what you do and its viability they would be happy to become a partner in that business for the life of any contract.

And speaking of contracts, make sure you retain all rights to the content you create, there should be nothing in any contract handing ownership of that media to anyone else. If you part ways in a couple of years you need to be able to take all that content with you.

#16

Re: Help with starting a new site

[QUOTE=dzinerbear;164662]
Doing it all yourself is a nice idea, and many do, but there’s a lot involved in running a site – most of us never dreamed of all the stuff that had to be done until it showed up once we hit the “on” button.[/QUOTE]

I agree. If someone likes making videos, that’s probably what they should do. Leave all the technical stuff to people who know how to do that, leave the sales to people who know how to sell, leave the site management to people experienced in that.

But, as said already, if there’s a company ready to do this for you everything needs to be read ten times before signing. There are some dodgy companies out there.

#17

Re: Help with starting a new site

[QUOTE=conran;164664]I’m not in the area of making media, I stick to the marketing, writing and promotion side of things, but from my experience I can add that you shouldn’t use Xtube views as a measure of potential success.

So, you have to wonder how many of those 100,000 views would actually pay for anything. Chances are most of them are there on Xtube because they have no intention of actually paying for anything.[/QUOTE]

My videos arent free. I only have one free video and the 100,000 views dont refelct the free video. I make decent money from xtube but they take more than half and are shady too with lies and late payments. Thats why I want to get on my own and am very weary about going into the business with someone else.

#18

Re: Help with starting a new site

Then I do suggest you look back on Michael’s (dzinerbear) post. You’ll quickly become overwhelmed, taxed and most likely get burned out, find yourself beating your head against the wall and all the while your stress levels rising.

You need to design a site, find a hosting company, find a content management system (CMS), set up an account with CCBill or license a system such as NATS, set up accounts with Epoch and Segpay or other processor if not only using CCBill, find someone that is experienced in setting those up and at what cost to you, handle customer service tickets when members run into problems or have general questions. Then there’s marketing your content, setting up social media (if not already) and building a following, creating promotional content for your affiliates to use when pushing traffic to your site. It’s a LOT of work that you are taking on yourself or going to have to pay someone to do. At what cost? That leads me to this:

You see all the sales and are thinking “Wow! I could be making so much more if I didn’t have to split it.” However, you’ll be taking on all of the other expenses not to mention cutting into your personal time. It will now become a 24/7 job for you.

In your own words: “I just want to bang str8 guys and make good porn n’ make LAMBO money all at the same time is really what it comes down to”

Not trying to beat you up, just want you to take another hard look at what you’re contemplating. Don’t let $$$ signs cloud your judgement and thinking or current success.

#19

Re: Help with starting a new site

I should clarify my response a bit…

You can do it all by yourself while you remain a small operation. There’s no need to pay for expensive bells and whistles for a 20 video startup site with 20 paying members. :smiley:

Personally, I think you should focus on VOD and DVD sales and let someone like Stunner or zBucks manage your monthly membership site. Just make sure you retain the rights to your VOD stuff and get it listed with AEBN and GayHot as well as continuing to sell your scenes on Xtube and MyDirtyHobby.

#20

Re: Help with starting a new site

keep making vids… dont worry about having a paysite Just yet… Xtube aint what it Used to Be… but it is still a place for ‘collectors’ and superfans to get to know you… you wanna have a good supply of clips… when you start your site.

FWIW… our Public Xtube account had about 20Million views after 5yrs?