Business model #1: Free porn accounts

This is description of a business model that's actually in use.

Goal

Make money.

Digest

  1. Create cheap 1-day account at porn site
  2. Hide the credentials behind a number of look-at-this-ad-before-getting-redirected URLs
  3. SEO for $pornsite password $date

Assumption

People don't want to pay for porn sites but are willing to jump through many hoops to get to login data for those sites for free.

Details

1-day accounts

Major pay-for-porn sites provide kind of "trial" accounts that cost 1 or 2 US$ and give you (mostly) the same access that normal accounts have.

They are valid for one or two days and automatically get converted into normal pay-per-month accounts if they are not cancelled at at the right time.

Why 1-day accounts?

Many people will try to access the porn site with the account's username and password. The following issues will arise:

Those issues still exist for 1-day accounts, but are of much less impact.

A new 1-day account every day makes it work for much more people, keeping your reputation.

Payment

Use virtual/disposible/one-time credit cards so porn sites cannot lock you out because you buy test accounts every day with the same credit card, and many people (IPs) try to access them.

Link locking

Several "link locking" services exist. They work the following way:

  1. Enter an URL in their service and get a "lock URL"
  2. Share that lock URL with people
  3. People click on that URL and see some advertisement
  4. The link to the original URL is only show after a couple of seconds so the ad view counts as "real"
  5. Link locking service gets paid by ad network
  6. Link lock account holder gets a part of the money

Combination

The business plan is to earn money by combining 1 day accounts and link locking.

To maximize profit, link locks are chained several times: Link 1 opens access to link 2, link 2 opens link 3...

The main task is to find the sweet spot in the chain at which people stop clicking before getting the credentials. It will damage your reputation if the account details are locked behind that spot.

Combination example

An example found in the wild web:

The pastebin-with-captcha in the middle is to prevent the user from thinking that they are locked in a loop and give up.

Possible earnings

One link locker site listed 6.6 US$ for 1000 views if they are from US-american viewers, and 2 US$ for 1000 views from german viewers. Prices got as low as 0.48 US$ for viewers from Tunisia.

Chaining the links multiplies the earnings, but not linear: People will stop clicking links after their personal bullshit limit.

If we take the combination example and assume that 500 people click through to the credentials in one day, and assume an average price of 2 US$ per 1000 views, then we would earn 500 views * 8 / 1000 views * 2 US$ = 8 US$.

We spent 1 US$ for the account, which leaves us 7 US$ per day.

Earnings improvements

To increase the number of views, more people need to click the links. This means search engine optimization, which costs, and maybe posting advertisements in search engines, which also cost.

Possible problems

Written by Christian Weiske.

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