"Online porn is a real form of commerce that exhibits it's guidelines to explorers because of technology and in spite of convention."

We may never be recognized as a bona fide industry. There will be no institutes of adult marketing and business with sprawling student-filled campuses. The World Wide Web has enabled us to teach and tutor newbies but they won’t earn real college credits no matter how much we instruct them. The adult Internet will always be a separate world within a separate world within a real world.

Online smut is different from the physical adult entertainment industry as well. We share our knowledge and information between ourselves, whereas our brick and mortar counterparts do not. Anyone that desires a career in the print or film end of porn has to penetrate a formidable wall of resistance if they want to obtain their goals.

Big dollars and restricted cliques are the status quo among adult filmmakers and magazine publishers. Hopeful, new adult online entrepreneurs have readily available avenues of study and information in the forms of resource sites. No such venue exists for anyone that wants to make a porn film or open a smut shop. Before the net came along, there were no how- to articles or lessons for making a living with sexual entertainment.

Online porn is a real form of commerce that exhibits it’s guidelines to explorers because of technology and in spite of convention.Very few actual careers so heavily depend on self-education. We build sites and hold forums where we openly discuss ideas, complaints and trends with our peers and competitors. The adult online community self-polices, self-educates and self-sustains.

How long can it last? Adult entertainment will never disappear but will this golden age of the adult webmaster go on forever? Is it probable there always be a chance for the average Joe to make a buck hawking net smut? Will the Borgs of regulation and finance assimilate little guys?

When a good thing comes along, a bigger thing buys it and cannibalizes it for the good parts. That’s the way life has been for millennia. We eat the big fish who the eat smaller fish who eat the plankton that thrive off the crap expelled by them all.

Big fish VISA has already begun attempts at assimilating third party billers. Smaller online porn sites and sponsors are right now scrambling to make themselves compliant before VISA’s newest deadline of November fifteenth. The days when some nobody could throw a paysite on the net and make a killing are long gone if they ever existed.

Anybody who wants to get into the high end of this game now needs lots of money, a genius understanding of this business and boatloads of premium content. The sureness of the adult net as a sole form of income becomes less each day. In ten years, where will we be?

Will we still be able to discuss our trade freely on message boards? Will we always have resource sites to turn to when we go looking for tools and services? Will sponsors always be there paying the common gallery builder or free site owner? Will governmental forces end the free adult site altogether? Will cheaters, illegal content mongers and virus expellers muck it up for everyone so much the powers that be shut down the Internet? Will the Internet continue to change lives as drastically and dramatically as it is doing now? Will the net become another homogenized platform for advertising like the television; film and music industries have become?

Who knows, the whole thing might be replaced by holographic imagery derived from implanted computer chips that are connected to some laser-generated Internet. Ooh. How Matrix.

The upside to all this downer talk is that things would have to come to apocalyptic circumstances before sex would stop being so damned important. We also can’t stuff genies back in bottles in an information age.

Sex on the net is demystifying the most basic of human needs like never before. Madison Avenue’s portrayals of perfection and reality are being disassembled in the homes of millions of horny surfers as I type. The sixties may have opened the sexual closet but the net shoves it into our email, our browsers and our office conversation.

Online porn is a feistier fish than anyone expected. The print and film monoliths of our business have yet to give us any real competition. The courts are having a hard time regulating online smut because they don’t understand it and the net is constantly, rapidly evolving. All this shared information and free trade may not last but it’s not going away for a while either.

Relax for now kids. It ain’t over yet.

They may not recognize us as a legitimate field but adult webmasters, paysite owners, sponsors, content providers, hosts, graphic designers, programmers, billers, resource sites, message boards and articles writers exist. We came from nowhere and if we do it right, we could be around for a long time to come.