Mint money like a porn mogul and advertise the competition
With $700 between them, Shuster and a partner launched their internet porn business. Within 18 months, they were among the elite of an online sector that was minting money when other dot-coms were living off the big eyes and fat wallets of Silicon Valley's venture capitalists.
While Shuster admits that porn was inherently popular with many internet users, he doesn't see content as the driving force for success. Ask him if he thinks that anyone can make money in porn simply because of the old adage that sex sells, and Shuster will reply with a flat "no," adding a seldom reported detail that many porn companies can, and do, fail.
What made the model work, according to Shuster, was his willingness to explore the unique nature of the web.
"The internet works in a very counterintuitive way," Shuster explains. "Adult webmasters like myself figured out pretty early on that they could often make more money advertising their competitors than they could selling their own product."
According to Shuster, the internet is a medium that rewards depth above all else, catering to individual passions that go narrow and deep, rather than the wide yet superficial pastimes enjoyed by the masses.
Porn tactics for the mainstream
While promoting the competition was an early building block for online affiliate marketing, Shuster sees it as a lesson that ought to be applied across the entire web for all revenue-driven marketing efforts.
The New York Times ought to dedicate quality ad space to The Washington Post, Shuster says, explaining that both publishers make the mistake of treating internet users as a depletable resource.
"People who go to either one of those sites have already expressed an interest in news," he says. "Visitors might actually want more news, so you need to take them there and figure out a business model that makes that profitable. The truth is that you can often make more money steering traffic away from your site than you can by trying to keep it on the page because users are looking to use the internet to dig deep on a given subject."
Shuster further illustrates his point by citing an example well known to adult webmasters who speak constantly of sending traffic to each other, but they seldom discuss incoming traffic or overall popularity as measured by sites such as Alexa.
"Adult webmasters know that people who go to a particular site may want blonde women," he says. "OK. So that site has blonde women, but so does everyone else. And no site will have enough blonde women to keep the user coming back, so sending him away can actually be more profitable."
While you might disagree with Shuster, it's worth asking yourself precisely how Google built its online empire. Although the search giant's products are now too numerous to count, most share one commonality: Google is in the business of taking users exactly where they want to go and slicing off a fractional fee for connecting everyone to, well, everyone else.
Of course, there are limits, and it's not as if Google would serve up a Pepsi ad on Coke's site. But as Shuster explains, branding is a totally different animal online.