If you know anything about the adult industry; and since you are reading this, I assume you do; you know that there are few industries that are as competitive. In fact, mere competition doesn’t really explain the situation. Hyper-competition would be a better description.

I’m willing to bet that after a stint selling smut in online adult you could probably make a decent living selling air conditioners to Eskimos…or sand to Egyptians…IUD’s to nuns? Okay, I’ll quit.

But have you ever wondered why there are so goddamn many porn sites? It’s not like there are merely a lot, when you go to the grocery store and stand in the toothpaste aisle, there is a LOT of toothpaste; the adult business is more like an entire grocery store FILLED with toothpaste.

Most people think it’s because the adult market is just so freakin’ huge that demand is what has created the sheer volume of sites. I don’t think so. There is a lot of money in porn, but the key is where the money is concentrated – at the top. Not just near the top, but at the very tip top – the owners.

This is very different from most businesses. Think of lawyers, for example. If you get a job at a law firm, you bust your ass and the firm becomes successful, one day you‘ll make partner. You will be rewarded for your contribution to the success of the firm with a piece of the action. Or even the straight dot com world, you start off at a small startup, you work your ass off and one day you cash in all those stock options and make a bundle off your hard work. Think of all the millionaire secretaries at Microsoft and millionaire developers at Google.

This is a very common practice, heck, one of my last pre-porn jobs was for a dot.com and as a high-ish level marketing executive I got a piece of the action. To recruit me the investors granted me some shares of stock. Now, yes, they ended up being worthless, but I still had something to work for while I was there.

This NEVER happens in adult, except in the most rare of cases. Instead what happens is that as a professional in the adult world you get the privilege of watching your boss get richer and richer and richer. While your salary may climb, it’s not at anything approaching the lottery like rate it would as an owner. Hell at one point, at my last proper full time adult job, the owner was making more in one month than the entire annual payroll of the rest of the staff and he wasn’t shy about letting us know. For example, hilariously, one year the owner had people over right before Christmas to share plans for his new mansion, which he pointed out cost him more than ten times our year end bonus checks.

Not the mansion, just the plans.

What a great way to inspire your employees! “Hey kids – I think you guys are worth 1/10th of this here sheet of paper! Now carry on, make me more.”

So what happens? Instead of good employees sticking around for the long term and being rewarded for doing so, they quit and start their own companies. It is made plainly apparent that the only way to make real money in adult is through ownership.

This is a pretty retarded way to run a business, instead of building a strong, long term company and keeping your competetion to a minimum; you are running an on-the-job training program for your competitors. You bring people in, share all your trade secrets and then kick them to the curb and then start all over training someone else. All while your ex-employees go off on their own to take business away from you. You end up with an industry of a few monsters and a zillion minnows.

Fortunately, however, even your average minnow, if he’s smart (and paid attention and took good notes during on the job training at his last gig), can make a very decent living.