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Mr. Marin says he also sets up many sites for so-called amateurs who hope to make money on sex. That includes former 'exotic dancers' who strike out on their own, plus 'lawyers and CPAs, though I'm sure they don't want their names used.'
Experts say hundreds, perhaps thousands, of such nonprofessionals have joined the online sex business. Sextracker rating service says there are 280,000 adult-content Webmasters and 60,000 pay sites.
'The porn business has always attracted morons,' moans Al Goldstein, the veteran publisher of Screw magazine who lives in Pompano Beach. He charges $20 a month for his online version, and he believes the Internet will eventually drive printed porn out of business. But that's also the fate that awaits most dot-coms.
'You have 4,000 people trying to do the same thing,' says Goldstein, 64. 'So the morons are going out of business.'
'It's just like any other business,' says Richard Glidewell, a Sarasota investment counsellor who has studied the online sex industry. 'The big fish eat the little fish.'
Mr. Marin's site, says Mr. Glidewell, was a middle-level dot-com squeezed at both ends. A global giant, Python, now employs hundreds of women for live Webcasts and can charge much lower prices.
'Then at the other end, there are all the amateurs, which provide an authenticity that a lot of these professional sites never can.' Most are one or two persons in home studios, in which women bare all in regular Webcasts while subscribers type in requests. 'There's a kind of goofy innocence about it,' Mr. Glidewell says.
Media Metrix says viewing of 'adult content' sites has grown steadily -- but only at the pace of general Internet growth. For years, about one-third of all U.S. surfers have visited a sex site at least once a month. In May, 25 million looked at porn.
There are no figures available for Canada, but the one- third ratio may apply here.
While many sex dot-coms charge $1 to $3 for a three-day tryout and up to $30 for a monthly subscription, their financial bottom lines aren't known, but Playboy.com has published its annual report in preparation for going public.
In 1999, the company performed like most dot-coms -- losing money. Last year, it had net revenue of $13.6 million and a net loss of $11.4 million.
Despite widespread belief on how sex sites flourish with subscriptions, Playboy.com earned only 18 per cent of income from the $6.95 monthly fee for its CyberClub. The rest came from the usual dot-com sources:
e-commerce and banner ads. The Playboy. com balance sheet was so dismal, says a writer in eCompany, that it had ' Round neck latex catsuit with zippered open crotch Latex Catsuit'
Like many other dot-coms caught in the uncertain stock market, Playboy has delayed its IPO. So has Seattle-based Internet Entertainment Group (IEG), famous for providing sensational images of actress Pamela Anderson Lee and talk-show host Laura Schlessinger.
IEG has set aside its IPO ambitions because of reports that its owner, Seth Warshavsky, is under federal investigation for possible income tax evasion and credit-card fraud.
For virtually all sex sites -- whether they feature men or women -- credit cards have become a major problem because many customers claim they have been falsely billed.
The problem is so severe that American Express no longer allows its cards to be used on adult dot-coms. Spokesperson Joanne Fisher says the company spent a year working with site operators to improve matters and didn't get anywhere.
Visa merchant banks have also clamped down because online sex chargebacks are considerably higher than the overall average of 0.7 per cent.
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