ATTENTION: The adult industry has changed a LOT, but more money is being made from porn now than EVER before! I’m going to reveal the top 3 methods for making a metric shit-ton of money in the online porn business. (One of these methods is something you’ve NEVER even thought of!)
They say that in any business, the market is always going to change over time. That may be true, but even with this principle in mind, it’s hard to overstate the seismic shift that occurred in the porn industry over the last couple decades. Back in the 1990’s, porn consumption went through the roof due to VHS sales (people could watch naughty videos at home, instead of in old-school seedy adult theaters). Whacking it to “Butt Babes do Boston” in your Vaseline-stained lazy chair became a thing.
In the early 2000’s, the internet provided an even easier way to access the video nasty that people were craving. Adult paysites sprung up all over the place, and money started to pour into the online porn business like holiday shoppers into a Walmart on Black Friday morning.
The adult porn business boomed….before promptly collapsing.
The problem was that just as easily as online paysite porn made the scene, the adult tube sites showed up, and the music threatened to stop on an industry that had been dancing pretty hard for a while. After all, suddenly you could either pay for it here, or get it for free over there. Which one do you suppose people chose in overwhelming numbers?
With nobody willing to pay anymore, it became virtually impossible to make money from porn. Hard times, to say the least – and terrible times to be in the adult content business.
Fortunately, things have stabilized since then, as the market has found a new equilibrium after all the tumult. Making money off porn is now not only possible again, but we’re actually living in an age of serious opportunity in that business: Many people are raking it in as adult internet marketers and content producers.
The online porn business has bounced back with a vengeance in recent years, with amateur content creators now making eye-popping amounts of money.
But you have to understand the current state of this industry and how to take advantage of it; gone are the days of opening a studio and paying some adventurous 18 year olds ridiculous sums to make a video, confident that you’re going to get it all back and more by renting that content at the corner store, or offering it as premium content on an adult paysite.
Nowadays, you’re more likely to have to give that video away for free and profit off of it indirectly, or else find an entirely different way to monetize the pervasive and eternal human interest in all things freaky-deaky.
There are three key methods for adult internet marketers to make money from porn, and I want to go over them below, for those interested in getting into this business as it stands today. If done correctly, each of these methods can make you a mountain of money (though ONE is particular is definitely the best way to go, for reasons I’ll shortly reveal).
Porn Money Method #1: Tube Ad Revenues
If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. Porn tubes like Xvideos and PornHub pulled the rug out from under the professional porn industry about 20 years ago, but in so doing, they’ve become profitable businesses in their own right. By showing ads along with the free adult content which visitors access, revenue is generated – and not just a little.
Moreover, because a greater volume of videos means greater ad exposure and thus greater revenue, the tubes have chosen to incentivize production by offering revenue share programs to those who post new content. This offers a virtually limitless way to make money from porn; or at least, it’s limited only by the amount of content you can post and, consequently, the amount of ad revenue you can bring in.
Porn tubes like PornHub and XVideos have decided to go the way of Youtube and offer revenue sharing for ad views to their amateur content partners. Depending on how many views a channel generates, the income can be quite substantial.
There still isn’t much money to be made this way on “vanilla” porn: That is, straight sex between a man and a woman, with no frills. That market is over-saturated to swamp-level proportions. But you can definitely have a shot at success by producing edgier content, appealing to porn genres like rough sex, BDSM, and sex in public. Produce enough content targeting any or all of these niches over a long enough time, and you stand a chance at generating interest – and revenues.
I won’t lie; people are doing very, very well with this. Top Xvideos and PornHub content producers can easily see $50,000 in a month. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy money. To use this method, you need to have the cinematography skills to shoot a good, compelling, and of course, arousing video.
Top content producers on the major porn tube sites are making over $50,000 per month, and much of this income is passive, since popular videos will tend to get views for months or years.
And you’ll need to use those skills often, because it’s necessary to put up a LOT of content frequently, so as to attract a devoted fan base who will watch your stuff endlessly, racking up ad views. These viewers are voracious for content, so you’ll need to feed them steadily and consistently to blow up your channel.
Lastly, you’ll also require good filming equipment, which costs money, and relationships with suitably hot, reliable performers (who will want their cut). And for all of that, your content might just…never take off. As in, ever. Tastes on the porn tubes can be fickle, so oftentimes what YOU think is hot isn’t necessarily what THEY think is hot.
Porn Money Method #2: Premium Snapchat
Many women in the adult entertainment industry, most especially webcam models and porn stars, are very successfully making money off porn by selling access to a “premium” Snapchat account. For a monthly fee, fans get access to a regular stream of nude and explicit content from their favorite performer. Subscriptions are managed through platforms like FanCentro.
Premium Snapchat can be a very lucrative way for adult performers to make money from their porn content. Many models are making over $10,000 per month, with several of the top pornstars making way more than that.
The reason followers are willing to pay for this stuff when very similar material is available on the tube sites for free, is because they feel that they know the person in these videos, while the tubes offer only faceless (to them) “porn stars.” Snapchat really lends itself to this kind of “audience bonding,” and has become a great way to sell adult content, as a result.
Never underestimate the power of this “I like you, now take my money” effect; it’s the main reason cam models are able to show a profit, and those girls can do VERY well.
If you’re not a model or adult performer yourself, you can partner up with one or more attractive ladies willing to make money with explicit content (you can put out feelers on Craigslist, and on sites like SexyJobs.com). Once you find the right match, you can direct the production of the content, as well as the marketing strategy for your model’s account, in exchange for half of the profits.
The downside to using the premium Snapchat account strategy is that it can be difficult to get off the ground with new accounts, especially if the model(s) aren’t well-established on social media. The vast majority of the successful ones belong to performers who already have large fan followings on Instagram and Twitter, so this isn’t a good way for a new girl to start building herself up.
That means if you don’t have a professional relationship with a well-established cam girl or porn star, this option may not be feasible for you, and you’ll need another way to make money from porn.
Top Porn Money Method: Fetish Blogs
Of the three porn monetization methods we’re discussing today, this is my favorite, as it entails the least risk (no equipment or other heavy expenses required) and doesn’t demand that you have powerful contacts in the industry. All you need is a computer, an internet connection, and the ability to coherently string a few sentences together.
The idea here is to write sex blogs targeting a specific fetish, then monetize them by referring their traffic to explicit content paysites with whom you sign up as an affiliate (here’s my list of best adult sponsors). Any purchases made at the linked site (using your individualized affiliate link) will generate revenue, a percentage of which will be shared with you as a commission for helping make the sale.
Fetish porn blogs carry little risk, low startup costs, and can be created without needing to have relationships with any porn performers or content creators.
Note here that general-interest sexual topics are a terrible way to make money from porn on blogs; they’re way too saturated, and you’ll get buried by the competition in the SERPS (mostly from tubes). But if you select a sufficiently obscure niche fetish and write about that, the chances are you’ll be one of a relative few who does, and your site should steadily climb the ranks for the relevant topic on Google.
The key is to write informational articles on the blog about the fetish, and why people are into it. With every odd sexual fetish in porn comes curiosity about why in Tarnation people find themselves into it. Most of these curious people searching for this information are newly inducted fetishists, so it’s the perfect audience to target.
Give them plenty of info, then suggest they check out your paysite sponsor site for some explicit visuals (make sure to link to it with your affiliate code).
If you generate a good load of content (usually about 30 articles), keep it narrowly focused, and use keyword research tools (Backlinko is a good resource for this) to guide you in your quest for terms to target, you can get respectable Google rankings within 6 to 8 months.
It’s important to create a Twitter account that links to your blog, then use that account to follow others in the fetish niche you’ve chosen. Make a tweet for every article on your blog, and use every relevant hashtag when posting. This will speed up traffic growth considerably by getting some small bits of initial traffic flowing, which will allow Google to collect usage metrics for your site. If the metrics are good, your pages will rank faster.
Contrary to popular belief among many in the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) world, backlinks are NOT necessary to get decent rankings on Google anymore. Yes, an established authority site linking to your blog can certainly help, but it’s not essential. What you need are long, quality articles that pull the reader in and get them to spend time on your site. Google will see that as a signal that your site’s pages are good quality resources, and it will rank them higher.
If you don’t wish to write the content yourself, you can get cheap articles written for you by freelancers at sites like IWriter.com, UpWork, and Fiverr.
Nowadays, Google values backlinks (links from third-party sites to your site) much less than in years past. A new site with 30 good articles on it can rank decently for moderately competitive search terms within 6 months.
What you WILL need, though, is excellent webhosting to serve your blog. And not just any webhosting, it has to be with a company that accepts adult content (most don’t) and has fast, reliable servers. Google’s search algorithm now highly values fast-loading websites, so you need to make sure yours is on a zippy server. I recommend HostWinds because it’s proven to be perfect for all my needs, and is very affordable.
When you sign up for hosting, you’ll have an opportunity to register your blog’s domain name. Try to get a domain that contains at least a word or two relevant to your porn niche. For example, if it’s a blog on foot fetish, try for something like “FootFetishInfoVault.com” or similar.
Obviously, this strategy takes some patience. As I said, it can be half a year before you realize decent web traffic. But as long as you stick with it, that traffic is extremely likely to come in time, and when it does, it can be reliably monetized through affiliate programs.
This is the “slow and steady wins the race” method of making money off porn, and again, it requires very little in the way of overhead. It may not be as glamorous as some of the alternatives, but it works. Once you get those rankings, you’ll likely be receiving free organic traffic to the blog for quite some time, and that means PASSIVE INCOME.
Hands down, this is your best option.