This is a question I get asked all the time on board, forums, and pretty much when anyone finds out I work on the internet or online. The story starts in 1997 and I have had a lot of experience in just about every segment of the online adult industry. In 13 years, you can imagine just how many successes and failures you can rack up over that time. It is much too long to put in a single post, but I will occasionally talk on the timeline for those interested.

So int 1997 was when it had began for me. I was getting out of college, and had entered the real world. While in college, I had spent a lot of my free time looking around the internet for fellow foot fetish folk like myself. There was not even 1% of what is available today, but there were a few people who had gotten in on the ground floor. Some doing celebrity feet, others basically copying old Leg Show pictorials and using them for content on foot fetish sites. A lot which I recognized from my collection and chuckled.

Anyway, after I finished school I wanted to do a site like others. I had not intention of reinventing the wheel but there were around 3-5 differnet celebrity foot fetish sites that all had some admirable qualities, but did not really have everything I wanted in one site. My idea was to take the best things from those sites I liked, and just make ONE SITE that had it the way I LIKED it. One problem… I did no know HTML, web design, etc..

So I went to Barnes and Noble and picked up a book on web design. Back then you did not have the programs you do today. Today you can get WYSIWG (what you see is what you get) editors that make it so simple a monkey could do it. However, I learned some basic code and web design and was off. I basically self taught myself how to do things over time.  In hindsigtht, I would recommend someone take a basic HTML class at their community college. It will teach you 80% of what you need for basic web mastering. But I digress….

So I started with a basic web page back then. I made every mistake you could have. Music on the page, all those glittery shit gifs and animations, it was a mess. Back then I thought it was lovely, as I had never done something like that, but over time I was unhappy with the design compared to competition. So I was always working on it. I worked full time in telco, and then would come home and work another 4-6 hours on my celebrity site.

Keep in mind, this was all static HTML pages and coding by hand back then. Today, you can get automated scripts that will do almost everything for you. So you can cut down a lot of webmastering tasks via server side CRON jobs, automation, content management scripts, content spiders and so on. Which gets your actual work time down to an hour or less a lot of times depending on the site.

Over time, the site started to take off. As shitty as it was, although I was always improving it, the site started to get a lot of visitors. So in no time the bandwidth was climbing up on the site. I was spending money out of my pocket to pay for that bandwidth bill as the advertising and other things I was trying at that time did not bring in enough to cover it. Bandwidth was much more expensive back then, and was costing me $500-900.00 a month. Something had to change.

I looked around the web and saw a lot of adult membership sites that charged a monthly fee for their site. I thought, this was a good idea. I would not charge $30.00 or whatever they had been charging. But I would charge enough to help pay for the bandwidth. After all, I was doing this site more out of my own passion then for money to start. I would charge $14.95 a month and if only a handful of visitors paid. I should be ok.

The concept worked. Although I had a lot more than a handful. The site actually paid for it’s bandwidth bill and then some. It was nice to actually be able to collect a modest pay check for the endless hours of time and trouble to collect and hard code a site for myself, and now others. So on top of my telco money, which was already a good living, I was making a few grand off this celebrity site per month. I looked at it as a hobby with a paycheck!

On this site, it did not matter if I made money or not. I was doing it for the passion of it. Which is something that I have come to find over the decade plus. If you truly are passionate about your site, your content you are producing, it does not need to be the best. My foot fetish and tickling content I have produced myself for my own sites was not the best. Camera shaking, girl next door types, no break out hotties, no males, no nudity. But when it came to sucking feet. The girls did it like I instructed and cha-ching! The money came.

I will pick up phase two on the journey at a later time. Hopefully you enjoyed part one.