How about adding a mainstream section to the board?

[fetishbank]

I think it's a good idea. We'll all learn something new, and maybe some of the new concepts can be applied to our adult business.

I moved my first steps in the internet marketing with mainstream stuff in 1997 or 98. I had some experience in mlm before, so I tried to apply it to the new media. I had not a big success, but made some some dozens of dollars (!), enought to understand it could work, if I found the right way to do it... during that struggling time, a guy told me he had an avs site and he was making a lot of money. It was 4 time more than my salary as programmer. The same night I started to build my own link list applying the concept I had learned from the mainstream link list I made the months before and taking some ideas from Greenguy & Richards Realm (still many thanks, guys!). It was instant success, few months later I quit my job and moved full time on the adult business...

Now, in these hard days my primary goal is to keep my site alive and profitable. I followed a bit the radio show yesterday night. I think there's nothing wrong with the link list model. It is not that model wrong, it's the whole adult indutry suffering, most for piracy (but perhaps there are other reasons). The weakness of sales affect not only us ("link listers") but primary the paysites. Many of then run out of business, including big names... Also, it's not a matter of traffic, I'm (we are) still having enought, it's a problem of sales! It's a hard moment, the whole economy sucks, the low value of the dollar is an extra problem for me poor european webmaster (let's say a -35% income) but I believe there is a future for us and the strong will survive...

I don't really want to see my creature, Fetish Bank, die. I put all my love in feeding and growing it during all these years. I like this job and don't want to go back to office work nor I want to invest tons of money in a (risky) conventional business. Consider, when I was 12 I was renting my porn magazines to my classmates. At that time I wrote my first very well done piece of software for the C64. It was a program to manage my porn magazines (to keep track of what I rent, to who, and so on) saving all the data on 5"1/4 floppy in random access files. Close to be a professional software! So, isn't this job a mission for me ?

Beside that, not analizing new business models is stupid. In the past months I studied and passed the exam to get a real estate license. I don't think I'll ever do that job, but, if I want, I can start tomorrow. At the same time I'm following a course to see if I can improve a bit my (poor) english. Old people says: "better you dig the well before you get thirsty !"...

All this long and annoying story to say: "I think it is a good idea to talk a bit about mainstream" : )