Encore!

So the other day a friend of mine came over for a drink. A few days earlier he called and said he had and idea and some questions about running a web business.
We had not seen each other in a while and -as you should know by now- I am happy to give advice. After a few glasses of wine this prim & proper fellow (not the kind I usually hang out with, but he's a real good guy anyway J) finally spits it out: He is hell-bound to open one of these "unmentionable" pages: Porn. He wants to make it high class and honest. Plus he plans on opening another page, because he found THE deal to open a gambling page. With license and everything.

Well - here I was. Thought I've seen and heard it all and the most unlikely guy comes up with that.
First of all he tells me that he can get a good deal on buying material for the adult page. He would not tell me, how much the offer was, but I assume it was at least four figures (no pun intended), otherwise I suspect he would have done it right away. Besides that he was looking for someone who could program that for him, and maybe I could…
The second (gambling page) he wanted to open was even better: A company offered him a license to make it all legal, and the best was: they would even do the programming for him, he would only have to run the page. The license was given from some jurisdiction in the world's hinterland and it was supposedly valid for running a casino-page anywhere.

I was flabbergasted, floored, borderline hoping he was joking. He was not.

Remember "The Matrix"?
I felt like the Oracle: "… I hate giving good people bad news":
All claims are handed out: No more fast money in adult or gambling anymore, apart from the fact that you are skating on thin ice with any of those businesses. Also you might be asking for trouble if you indeed get a bigger piece of the cake than some of the established fine business men would like you to. (D)DOS attacks and threatening emails might be your smallest problems.

I declined the job for doing the programming for the adult page and strongly recommended to leave the casino license alone.
My suggestion for adult and gambling pages along with all other "get rich fast" schemes is: Leave them alone!
The market is under-regulated and over-crowded, and buying a lottery ticket at you local mall gives you a better chance of making some money than buying a dubious license for a casino.
When opening a web business, always follow the same rules as for buying shares on the stock market: Only invest as much as you are willing to loose, and if you loose, don't throw good money after bad.
There is no silver bullet for making money on the web. It is as much work as any other job - sometimes even more.