A Rather Daring Question to Ask

Nothing daring about adult marketing, compared to some of the "PC" marketing tactics shilled around...

Do a search for some adult webmaster forums, you'll learn a lot.

Not as "easy" as one may think tho.

You have had some good advice here and some "moral" advice.

You need to research both of your chosen large markets in more detail. Then make an informed decision.

The Adult market usually, but not exclusively, uses the 'Membership Site' principle and this is required by law in most countries. Telecomms tend to utilise an affiliate type model of one off payments for referrals, or residual income payments.

Membership sites, adult, dating, gambling (or even Internet marketing) normally have members with a finite life. That is they will leave after a while - but others (new members) will subscribe.

Telecomms, such as mobiles (cell phones) can generate residual income. Which is good. Remember though that customers are on finite (even if renewable) contracts. You must however, keep pace with ever changing technology, keep your site up to date daily, be up on the latest tariffs and so on. It is a constantly changing and very competitive market.

"Adult" on the other hand changes little. Put aside the technology and the same thing that appeals to visitors to your site (sex, dating or gambling), will have appealed to the earliest civilizations in the world and will probably still appeal to generations in the future.

The choice is yours, but if you select the latter, (Adult) your mainstream advertising opportunities will be limited and you need to be very very careful that you are not indirectly exploiting vulnerable people, when you choose the programs or people that you work with.

Just my thoughts,

Jeff.

for 8 years I taught classes about running an online business at a community college and had to deal with questions in this area every quarter, from reading the research of others:

the biggest online spending demographic is 17-35 year old single males; there is the most disposable income and the greatest inclination to spend it

this demographic uses their computers for, in this order:
1. porn
2. games

no contest where the largest online market is, that is, where the most money changes hands

WordTracker offers (or at least did offer, now that I think about I haven't seen one in a while) two different daily digests of searched key words, the clean list and the real list, even on the clean list you will find a few of the 'unclean' words; I've read that up to 20% of all web searches are for porn.

the competition is there because the money is there

the porn people were the first to monetize the Internet, back when it was dial up bulletin boards they were making money, they were the first to use autoresponders, they pioneered many of the marketing strategies now used every day by legit marketers

these facts are responsible in large part for Google being the way they are, for example ranking pages with 300-500 words of text higher, because so many porn vendors spoof site key words that 17-35 year old males search for other than porn or games, like skateboarding or motocross

that is the simple answer to your question, I leave it to you to struggle with the other ones

Coming from a guy who uses a WoW-based sig on a marketing forum? Not a compelling argument, my friend...

Now, to the OP:

I'm assuming by "adult", you mean "porn". There are, of course, other avenues - infoproducts RE: sex, selling toys/accessories/birth control, etc etc...

Now, I've never tried to be IN the porn "niche", so these are just theories. Take them with a grain of salt. However...

I imagine with the advent of stuff like YouPorn.com and RedTube.com, spending at porn sites would be way, way down... considering no one could ever watch all the stuff on those sites.

My thinking is that in the future, to survive in porn you'll need to have something really unique... Which, for most people, I assume means to focus on individual fetishes... and micro-fetishes... much like an "average" internet marketer would drill through niches and micro-niches.

Now, being an affiliate in porn would, I assume, require a LOT of traffic due to the aforementioned issues with visitors being almost totally (not quite totally though) freebie seekers... you're competing against so much free stuff it's almost unbearable.

I don't know much about the cell phone market... so I'll withold comments on that.

Either niche is going to be a really tough nut to crack... but porn is probably the more difficult of the two. Sure, potentially big payoff... but let's just say I don't think it's something most marketers (myself included) could pull off.

-Dan

Some people can't do adult or XXX sites as they do get wet multiple times while working the sites.