I don’t know about the malware laden part, but a few years ago I looked into running internet businesses and porn came out as the most profitable for the least investment and least effort.
It’s a numbers game that works better the more portals you have to drive traffic to the main site, hence posting on forums. The people posting on WWIC won’t be the owners of the main site, but drones who get a cut of any subscription they produce by sending someone to the main site.
There’s tons of porn sites that will give you a turnkey (i.e. ready to go) web site for free. You just host them and drive traffic to the main site and get paid for every subscription. With hosting costs down to a few dollars a month if you know where to look, you can run five hundred sites for about the cost of renting a small office, with very little work once they’re set up and no other overheads and, best of all, no bloody staff.
I can’t remember the details but some of the porn sites paid good money compared with everything else on the internet. Some people had done very, very well out of it, but I think they were probably people who understood a lot about search engine optimisation (SEO) and various other things that are necessary for most internet businesses to succeed. Probably they were also able to do it because SEO was simpler some years back, e.g. you just loaded the keywords on your site description with porn, adult, etc (like WWIC’s keywords are ww2, world war 2, ww2incolor, color, talk, discussion *) and the search engines picked it up. They don’t work that way any more but examine the content and traffic and frequency of traffic to a site, so to rank well you have to do well, which is why WWIC ranks well when there could be hundreds of thousands of other sites with the same keywords. I expect that most people who get into it without SEO and related skills don’t make money.
So far as posting links in forums goes, I would have thought it would be a lousy return on effort for manual posts, but bot posts would be a different thing if you can spam hundreds of thousand of forums for very little effort. The same principle applies to phishing for bank and credit card details. Even if your success rate is only a fraction of one per cent, you still net a decent amount of data when you’re sending out tens of millions of emails.
I didn’t touch it because I didn’t feel comfortable with it, but I have to say I thought seriously about it for a while because there was a dollar to be made.
If they’re carrying malware, the obvious risk is that they’re run by criminals trying to capture credit card details etc with spyware. There’s a better way I worked out years ago to become fabulously rich on the internet, and it’s going to happen sooner or later if it hasn’t already. Just set up a site that gets high volume credit card purchases, which becomes easier the cheaper and more popular the item is, then when you’ve captured tens of thousands of card details just max them all out and retire to Bolivia or Chad or anywhere that doesn’t have an extradition treaty with any developed countries. Or get into eBay’s or PayPal’s data banks - which someone might do who works there - and max out all the cards in there, which should make the sub prime mortgage crisis look tame. Then you’ll be able to buy your own country somewhere in the Pacific and not have to worry about extradition. Or ever going anywhere near civilisation again.
- How do I know that? If you’re using Internet Explorer, click View at top left, then Source, which displays the coding for WWIC, and six lines down you’ll see <meta name=“keywords” content=“ww2, world war 2, ww2incolor, color, talk, discussion” /> which tells search engines what the site’s about.
