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.
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Okay, so I’m not exactly in the mainstream porn world here. However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t like to keep an ear to the ground with what’s going on in areas like credit card processing, legal issues, and webcams.

So I’m perusing a forum thread on the topic of new regulations from CCBill regarding “leased” content and feeds on membership sites. Frustration abounds, since as you may not know, the credit card companies basically dictate what can and can’t be shown on websites down to the tiniest degree. The deal here is that there’s a new regulation from Visa saying that you can’t advertise content from other sites on your tour, ie. “Get free access to XYZ when you sign up!”, whether it’s a whole separate site or a plug-in feed of content.

I literally snorted at this comment:

“Why doesn’t Visa just produce all the porn for us so we can quit reacting to their steady stream of regulations?”

Seriously, man. Now I’m picturing what porn generated by banks and credit card companies would look like. Three minutes of fully clothed missionary position, perhaps. Thank god for European processors who may NOT BE RETURNING MY EMAILS ABOUT WHY I STILL CANNOT PROCESS CREDIT CARDS but at least don’t make you feel like “porn is the most regulated form of ‘free speech’ in the world” (quoted from the same thread as above).