You may have a cool product in the field of sports betting, casinos, or
lotteries. But almost all social networks and search engines won’t let you
advertise without a license from the required jurisdiction.
Good. You should face social stigma for creating products that literally ruin people's lives.She finally gave it up, moved to Texas, and now manages influencer networks.
It's good that the law isn't the only line between good and evil. A bit of stigma is a bottom-up way for people to shape society.
If nobody invites you to dinner parties because you run a startup that combines payday-lending and day-trading, that's a good thing. It's free alpha for companies doing more worthwhile things.
> Employees join such projects for various reasons. Some realize that the pay is better than in legitimate projects. Others come because they couldn’t find a job where they wanted to, or because they are simply interested in working on something forbidden. And then a good company saving the world will come along and offer them a job, and they’ll leave. Building a stable team from people with this kind of motivation is hard.
I think OP made this whole article up. Everyone that applies for Aylo knows exactly what they're applying for. The pay is below-average because (a) there's not actually a lot of money in porn and (b) there's no shortage of dudes that want to work in it.
It's important to keep these things (almost) in the open, because when they become illegal, criminals move in and people get hurt.
When I was an intern at a big-name, conservative company, one of my friends came from a porn website.
It's really strange that we de-facto allow the few large credit card networks (Visa, Mastercard) to effectively impose their own particular views and values on what sorts of businesses can process payments. The stigma+roadblocks against these "high-risk categories" generally doesn't come from the processors (like Stripe, Adyen), but are actually driven by the networks themselves, in response to lobbying by groups such as Collective Shout. https://nabesaka.com/visa-mastercard-deciding-content-legali...
Whatever you think about NSFW media or gambling in particular, you _should_ worry that Visa and/or Mastercard could decide tomorrow that they don't want to process payments for you and cause you to lose your livelihood.
It's been a while since I've read article on something like online gambling without feeling like the author was trying to proselytize.
Edit:
I appreciate the human perspective shared by the article, and get the feeling that OP offers a warning of the consequences of working in stigmatized fields. Ofc online gambling (and gambling in general tbh) is a terrible thing that ruins lives.
If you don't appear to be a casino at first glance, it's a lot easier to find employees, payment processors and advertising networks willing to work with you.
Brick-and-mortar companies (notably Walmart) used the same trick to get tech talent. Having Walmart on your tech resume doesn't look great, having an e-commerce startup called jet.com looks much better, even if Walmart is that startup owner and sole customer.
I stopped to think what a cool product in this area may look like, without being toxic. Maybe a site explaining why betting loses money in the long term, or how casinos hook gamblers up with random-looking but not entirely random responses of the one-handed bandits?
That’s because you are operating in the market of degeneracy, taking profits by offloading your victims’ losses on their commercial counterparts through the bankruptcy system and the rest of us through social services.
There is a reason there were laws against this until the degeneracy operators figured out how to further corrupt our democracy.
Compared to something else that sells a tangible good on the internet, or some ordinary software as a service thing... If you have 10,000 charges to 10,000 different people placed from an ordinary merchant, and you compare that to 10,000 charges from a porno website, there will be a vastly larger number of chargebacks and human-caused fraud disputes with the porno website. It's a continual and ongoing pain in the ass for any credit card processor that does business with such a merchant.
The major processors (stripe and its top competitors) have decided that it is not worth the hassle and are completely happy to cede this niche market to specialists. Basically for the same reason that a car loan through a subprime lending company originated by a "buy here pay here" car sales lot will have a much higher percentage interest rate, because of the risk to the lender, credit card processing for the adult entertainment market will have a much higher percentage fee charged to the merchant to run those cards.
Why do you think Onlyfans is the reigning platform for what it does.
Not because it's technically superior, or has the best advertising, or any other logical reason you might summon.
It's because they have a sweetheart deal with a payment processor (Stripe).
I put some time into seriously investigating what it'd take to get an adult-content platform off of the ground, here is one of the emails I received from a self-advertised "high-risk processor":
> "Yes, we do have some Payment Facilitator solutions. However, none of these processors will accept Adult content."
Nobody will touch it with a 10 foot pole. It's absolute bullshit and is ripe for disruption.What I would LOVE to see in the United States in particular is a system where we tax pornography and then plow that money back into sex education in public schools. The state of sex education in the United States is so far beyond a joke it is a travesty.
That said, I also feel a lot of folks who are pro-legislation are quite dishonest about the negative side-effects of legalization. They definitely exist!
Gambling/betting though? Overwhelming societal damage with basically no upside beyond the ghouls in charge. Regulate this shit to death, tyvm.
I know I will get downvoted for this because it is an unpopular opinion, but this exactly the reason why we need bitcoin as a means of payments without any middlemen involved.