The five ambitious techies, led by Philip Brandes and Michael Hayes, founded AdultWebmasterSchool.com (AWS), the first-ever educational institution for aspiring adult porn webmasters.
"Get Paid To Look At Porn," is the school's motto
"We ended up teaching a lot of people who had the tech skills in place, it was just a different product that they were pushing," Hayes told XBiz.
Nearly four years later, AWS is earning its stripes and can be credited with graduating nearly 2,200 of the sharpest porn webmasters into the marketplace, most of whom are hard core techies who knew the revenue potential of the Internet combined with porn.
Riding on the coattails of the online adult industry's success and billion dollar revenue projections, AWS promises its graduates that they can make an average of between $500 and $2,500 per week as adult webmasters.
The school is based on a virtual porn curriculum in the form of a course guide and video tutorials, with teaching staff on hand to fill in the gaps.
AWS's global student base communicate with each other via message boards and chat rooms and the curriculum is completely self-paced so that students can hold down other jobs or care for families at the same time.
"It's obviously a demand-driven industry if you look at the numbers," Hayes told XBiz. "It really doesn't surprise me that we would have such a big outpouring from students looking for a successful online business that they can do from home."
AWS's curriculum teaches students how to build thumbnail galleries, create free porn sites and paysites, analyse conversion ratios, niche effectiveness, click-through ratios, sponsor sales, and traffic bandwidth, among many other webmaster skills.
Hayes himself ended up as a porn instructor after working for several mainstream technology companies in New York. His most recent mainstream job was working for a web portal site for senior citizens. After being laid off in 2000, Hayes moved out to San Francisco in search of work.
"I bumped into a friend at the time who hadn't even finished college and he was doing affiliate programs and pay-per-clicks and making $20,000 per month. I said to myself, 'I gotta learn how to do that.' Around that point we decided to form a school."
According to Hayes, the start-up costs for AWS were extremely minor and really only entailed building the site and developing a curriculum. Hayes and fellow teachers pull in a comfortable salary based on a fairly nominal tuition fee of $140 and a side business the five of them launched called Adult Profit Network, an adult paysite service.
"Becoming an adult webmaster is a great career, especially once you realize you're literally getting paid to look at porn!" AWS states to perspective porn students. "Plus, no bosses breathing down your neck, no commuting to work, no more wasting the rest of your life. Imagine making a salary equivalent to a doctor or lawyer, without the stuffy office and the daily 9-5 grind?"
