Hi everyone! Sorry I'm a little late to the thread, but I thought I'd address some of the questions people have been asking!
I found it very interesting that the author of the article in the OP was willing to pay 20 and 40% to a third party to receive payment. From what I can tell the third party was providing very little service above collecting payment.
It's crazy how high the fees are! From what I've seen and experienced, the credit card processors take about 20%, then the big third party sites (like Clips4Sale and ELM) take an additional 20% on top in order for them to make money. It's great for us since there's basically no other way to accept sales other than going through them (normal payment processors refuse adult transactions and will lay the banhammer on you swiftly holding your money hostage). At least with the 3rd party sites, they send a ton of paying traffic our way so even at 40% in fees, it's still well worth it.
What are the rules to process payment for porn? Why are they force to pay huge fee?
The rules are that you basically have to follow their rules and not sell content that they find "morally objectionable", though I've never found a comprehensive list of these rules and it seems like the only way to find out about them is when they come in and say your stuff is no bueno. Originally my site had a store where you could buy my clips with bitcoin through BitPay, but since the clips featured things like drug use, implied non-consent, and incest roleplay, we had to take down those clips. It was almost funny, every time they complained and told me I had to fix it, I'd take down the clips, resubmit for approval, then they'd have another list of clips I need to take down. Once it stopped being funny (very quickly), I just told them fuck it we'll just take down the whole store and only sell through Clips4Sale.
I think the huge fees come from the risk associated with accepting credit cards for porn. Chargebacks are rampant ("Honey, I have no idea what all these charges for clown incest sex websites are for, I'm calling the credit card company to dispute them right away!"), and I suspect porn is one of the number one uses for stolen credit cards. Even though I deal with my customers directly, its crazy the number of times that cards get declined for being associated with fraud, and then the customer disappears.
I've been boring a friend silly over the last few months about Bitcoin. Finally I found something which got his interest. Cheesy
Thank you Sexy Saffron.
You're welcome, and feel free to spread my nakedness all over the interwebs!
They may be happy doing what they are doing, but how long can they continue this? Smiley
We love what we do! Every day is amazing, we wake up, have breakfast together, walk the dogs, go to the gym, shoot a little video, then hang out on the internet smoking weed and watching Star Trek! All the while making more money sitting at home than we ever did working for other people, combined. Our plan is to remain entrepreneurs in the sex industry forever, and this is just the beginning. We're looking into erotica, sex toy affiliates, and even opening other studios! There's so much to do in this space, and we love it and could never go back, even if it means that we aren't necessarily the stars of our videos in the future
Porn is a very interesting commodity; it has unlimited demand but a limited-unlimited supply. You could never produce enough porn to satisfy an ever growing demand, so our job is basically just produce, produce, produce!
But does the couple then take the bitcoin and convert it into fiat?
Nope! We've never sold bitcoin for fiat, and we have no plans to. Our situation right now is that the majority of our income comes in through fiat, so we use that to pay all our bills, then the rest goes into bitcoin. We only keep about 6 months worth of expenses in fiat just in case, but the dream is that eventually everything will come in through bitcoin and we'll only cash out enough dirty fiat dollars to pay off whatever thug-government controls our area. The big appeal for us is that bitcoin allows us to store our wealth in a way that no one could take it from us against our will. Secondary is that it makes our business far more efficient and far reaching, since a lot of what we do is contrary to the delicate sensibilities of the people in power.
I don't expect them to have riches beyond their wildest dreams and they will be retiring after a few years of this. I just appreciate the story for what it is and not saying this is the best decision they could make or even that I'd make this decision just to be clear.
It's actually interesting you mention that, since our wildest dreams are actually very attainable, I think. We're not really into possessions, we gave or threw away most of our possessions because they were cluttering our lives and making us miserable (we tried to sell a lot of it, but amazingly no one wanted our junk either
). We're basically living our dream right now; working only for ourselves, on the things we want to, doing what we love, which is porn. We eat, breathe, and live porn every single day. Our laptops are basically just porn and reddit machines (with a little bit of video rendering on top). The only thing that could really make us happier would be if we could get out of our little apartment and into a little house outside of Montreal where we could have peace and quiet and porn and access to Costco/Walmart. Money is largely irrelevant for us, since we don't really buy anything but necessities. That being said, making as much as we do means we don't really need to worry about how much things cost, which is really nice.
Anyway, sorry for the wall of text, but I hope that answers some questions! I'll be around if you have any more!
XO-Saffron
