I ran a site once with lots of community content. Moderators worked for free and were just picked from the forums. Site was able to use as much bandwidth as I could get. We even started letting people donate hosting accounts and had a mirroring script they could run to help handle the bandwidth consumption.

So anyway, in my experience, traffic was easy to get and you'd make money if your revenue was greater than your bandwidth costs. Revenue came in from ads, donations, premium memberships with access to restricted areas and status in the forums, etc.. Re ads, pay per click is low, but affiliate stuff pays a lot - getting someone to sign up for a subscription to a high quality porn site nets big $$$ and there are always some people that have plenty of money and will pay more for better quality.

So anyway, if you see any good deals on bandwidth with no adult content restriction, I say go for it! :)

Porn is a $97billion industry worldwide, with the US only making up $13billion of that. The online share of this has been increasing as computers and internet have become far more common - and the privacy factor has helped as well. Depending on the site (single girl, live camera, niche content, adult "dating") they can be highly profitable with a high lifetime value per customer - enough where some of the affiliate programs pay out enough for yet a sub-industry to make a very decent living (I paid for my wedding this way - not ashamed to admit that).

When you say you don't pay for porn, do you torrent it, or do you use any of the "free" sites? If you are using the "free" sites - you are still generating someone revenue, even if it's a very small portion of it.

Firstly, even "free" porn makes money through ads. Lots of traffic x CPM always equals lots of money. Secondly, there is a huge business in high caliber and specialty porn. There are plenty of people out there with money to burn and a desire for something more specialized or higher quality than what you can find for free.

Edit: let me set up an exaggerated thought experiment for clarity. Imagine that the government commissioned a "one tru porn" project, creating a porn video that's a few hours long that is then hosted for free of charge for the world. It has all the normal sex acts anyone would want to witness, it has several very beautiful and very naked people in it, really, it's quite good. So why wouldn't everyone just watch that if they had a desire to watch porn? Quite simply put, because they want something else. They want a different experience, they want a different variety of people to look at, etc. The same phenomenon exists whether there is a small selection of free porn or a very large selection.

If nobody made money on porn, no new porn would be made. But there is tons of new porn being made. That money comes from somewhere.

My impression is that's largely a nickle-and-dime business (at least on the production side), but the lifestyle attracts people.

Direct subscription isn't the only revenue stream. I would imagine that ad revenue is a significant source these days.

There was a story a while back about a university that wanted to do a study on the effects of porn on men. I forget the specific thing they were looking for.

The study was cancelled because they couldn't find enough men who didn't watch porn for the control group.

There's plenty of eyeballs.

You are talking about this: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-12/uom-ate120109...

    We started our research seeking men in their twenties who had never consumed pornography. We couldn't find any.

But this is a different assertion (many people have consumed pornography once or a few times, but don't actively do it later in life), and this is canada (not USA)