Okay, well it's an Adult business thread so I'm actually qualified to offer an opinion.
I used to be the office manager at an Internet porn company before I started my own business. I've worked the back office in Adult businesses for about a decade. During that time, the following two scenarios occur with alarming regularity:
1. People pay money for pornographic photos/videos, so videographers and photographers think they can start a successful porn site.
2. People look at Porn sites that are on servers, so programmers/network admins think they can start a successful porn site.
This is somewhat akin to- I can fix cars, or design nice cars, therefor I should open a car dealership.
The problem is both 1 and 2 are cheap to hire and don't directly make you money. Traffic (well, sales) makes you money. The people that can send high conversion traffic have large, established high-payout sites to promote. Even if you get the dregs- they will require a commission that eats up most of your profit margin. Your overhead is a much higher percentage than that of huge legacy sites who have long since paid of capital expenditures, plus have a fair amount of non-affiliate traffic coming in.
Most people are horrified by the percentage cam providers take- but there are MANY options to choose from, and some ladies do work independently over Skype and YIM. They pay that percentage because the cam providers send a massive amount of traffic so their gross is inevitably higher than if they go it alone. It's no different from renting a Kiosk at the mall.
It's a sound business decision, but leaves a poor taste in customers mouths who want the girl to get more of the money. She always has that option, there are cam hosts of many different tiers, but you get what you pay for. Traffic- and more specifically conversion, is king. The ladies don't need a server or processor- those are a dime a dozen- they need a larger number of potentially paying customers. Bitcoin does not have that- it sends pitifully little traffic.
This is what is most important in an Adult site- it IS the business, but people without Adult industry experience who think porn is easy, relegate it to last place "Oh I'll hire someone" "Oh I can do Search Engine Optimization". Well so can everyone else- and with Adult margins they can hire the best of the best.
First thing you need to do if you are considering an Adult Internet business is rearrange the list of needed skills- first is marketing, second is talent management.
So if you are going to invest sweat equity- the best place to do it is marketing, as it is by far the most costly service to purchase- if you can even find someone decent that won't bankrupt you (which is unlikely). Investing the sweat equity of an inexpensive, easy to source skill set is not helpful.
The technical hurdles are minor. I don't do it, but I've hired people to setup Red/Wowza servers with different billing structures- it's nothing fancy. It's a few weeks of coding then you don't need programmers anymore. Same with designers. There is no long term, full-time position for either of them so why give them a share? The more labor you trim, the higher affiliate payouts you can afford, the more traffic you will get- so you have to run very, very lean.
With any new business venture, you want to determine what your USP is- your Unique Selling Proposition. In the case of "Bitcams" (I do like the name) that is accepting Bitcoins. That is the sole edge over the competition. They have far larger sites, more ladies, lower rates, more traffic- but you have Bitcoin. The problem with this is the lack of what
Warren Buffet refers to as a moat. It is an exceedingly low barrier to entry for competitors. So after a month or two, if things are slowly getting somewhere- they take a look at your Alexa rank, see you are doing okay- they start taking Bitcoin also and undercut you with all of their other advantages- long before you've paid off even a fraction of your initial investment. No moat.
I do Just-in-Time, Pull based staffing- it's part of my "moat" as it is horrifically difficult to implement in an Adult business. When you start, you will require several ladies, working several shifts, willing to sit in front of a camera and be abused all day long while they try and lure guys into paychat. They will not do this for free (really) and it will take you at least six months even with an aggressive affiliate program before you can even approach covering costs let alone earning a profit.
So you will need to pay salary- and a generous one, because girls decent looking enough to build your brand, don't work cheap. Not when there are so many high traffic cam positions open. No, not a single one will sign on based on a promise of big bucks down the line- pretty girls hear big plans from big talkers all day long. Even if you get one to say yet- her boyfriend needs beer money and he's not going to get it if she's on your site rather than an established high traffic site. So you will need a massive amount of capital for payroll.
Adult HR management is a nightmare. It's my personal daily nightmare. Attractive women are not used to being told what to do, or being held to any sort of reasonable standard. Every lady who starts to work at my establishment has been able to show up late, not show up at all, hand in poor quality work, for their entire adult lives and get a pass. Managing them to the point where their presence does not do more harm to the brand than good is incredibly difficult. You are basically running a McDonalds full of entitled hot chicks who are all too good to work the fry machine or take orders.
If you permit offshore models to work the cam, it is difficult to get 2257 compliant ID. She may just give you her older sisters ID, you really have no way of knowing. Big cam sites work with overseas "houses" to manage some of this, but it is still a significant risk. We don't have to go into what the jail time would be even for a single underage model.
So IMHO a cam site, without a USP, high startup costs, and a low barrier for entry is not a great idea.
That being said, there are a few ways one could use cryptocurrency (Bitcoin or it's successor) quite effectively for an Adult startup, with a wide moat and significantly lower startup costs. Which if anyone is interested I can go into- but this post is already insanely long winded
and wishful thinking will probably win out over logic and professional counsel anyway
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