So I’ve been exceptionally busy the past week or so… but you’ll know why in a moment. First of all, I had the immigration interview this week and now officially have my Green Card to stay in the US for a good while :) This is what the necessary paperwork looked like.

In other paperwork news, it’s also been catching-up-on-bookkeeping week, and I thought I’d share some of the financial details of running this site.

Many people assume that running a paysite, or any kind of camming/modelling rakes in the dough. Well, it can, don’t get me wrong. I see ads all the time on places like Craigslist to make a buttload of money modelling for adult sites, but it depends on what you’re doing. I have trouble relating to a lot of the other stats I see people post, since I seem to go about things in vastly untraditional ways.

Almost everyone from the webmaster side of mainstream porn world who checks out my site is horrified. Why are you charging so little! Where are the ads! Where are the galleries! Where is the update schedule! So I can’t promise I can really tell you what goes on in that big strange world of theirs. I do things the way I want. Even little things, like charging something like $10 instead of $9.95 makes me feel like I’m offering something special and personal, not a Wal-Mart special. I probably could charge and make more, or spend less, but then I’d feel like I was being held to expectations that were not in line with the way I want to expose myself here and run the place.

Anyway… my grand total income for StephTheGeek, Inc. last year?

About -$1500.

Now, there’s a lot of qualifying to happen there. 2006 was a year of disasters and shuffling. Mid-year, I changed payment processors, unfortunately to one that went under in the fall and still hasn’t coughed up my money. Luckily most people were still on my old payment processor, but they had changed their policies and I knew I had a death wish by trying to squeak by with more adult content. So I knew I had to make a switch once and for all, for everyone, and to a company that was more reputable. Hence, Verotel.

The details of that -$1500 are that I earned about $14,000 from the site and spent $15,500 on site/business expenses. Again, there’s a little more qualifying to be done in that some of these expenses are things I’d likely have (or have part of) anyway, such as internet, cell phone data plan, computer hardware, etc. But many are directly related to the site. These are my biggest monthly expenses on average:

Dedicated web hosting: $284.08 currently. A shared host just won’t do for the kinds of sites and traffic I run, plus this includes a basic server maintenance package to keep the server secure and provide occasional troubleshooting/installations as well as full daily backups.

Two high speed internet connections: ~$150. One just ain’t enough when you’re running stuff 24/7, plus the microwave link gives me a much better upload than DSL or cable.

Cell phone/data plan/phone: ~$100

Hardware: varies from nothing to hundreds, but rarely a month goes by where I’m not needing (okay, usually more of a “badly wanting”) a new webcam, or hard drive, or UPS, or digital camera accessory, or video card, or something.

Web help: $150-300. I stopped this a couple of months ago since the business really can’t afford it right now, but for the past 2-3 years I’ve paid out a small amount per month to have help with administrative web stuff, such as script tweaking, server maintenance, importing/exporting data, etc. Even having someone else to spend a couple hours a week doing some of the fiddly stuff was a huge load off me so I could focus more on the fun stuff :)

Misc. list of stuff: things like domain names, scripts, PO box/remailer, and related books/media.

And then there’s administrative stuff. Accounting (software and human), legal, office supplies, corporate fees, banking, not to mention the big cut that credit card processing takes out to start with.

Yes, I’m aware that not every person running their own pr0n site wants or needs a corporation or dedicated server or unlimited cell phone data connection :) But I see those all as things that reflect my love for what I do and the level at which I want to do it. I started out with nothing but a domain name and a shared host in 2000. It was just as great then, but my interest and needs grew.

I had spent years building things up to the point where I had hundreds of members. It was very exciting. Nothing I could live off of, but enough to get a nice new camera or monitor or sexy costume once and a while and feel like I was being rewarded for the time I put into it. Things were nice and self-sustaining until disaster struck. Now it’s going to take a while again to keep building things from, well, nowhere near hundreds of members right now :)

Anyway, I’m not sure how interesting all of this is to you, but many people ask me about the money behind running a place like this, so I thought I would share.