The conventional wisdom when it comes to online profits is that porn makes money while everybody else loses it. But while many adult websites and the businesses that cater to them continue to make bank, there is mounting evidence that prurience driven dot-com profits may be getting harder to come by.

"If I were starting out today, I wouldn't do it. That's because of the climate of the industry today compared to five years ago," said "Sparky," the owner of AsianCherry.net, a suite of six pornographic sites. When Sparky launched his Web properties in 1996, there were relatively few porn sites online. Today, as anybody who's typed the words "barely legal" into a search engine knows, literally hundreds of thousands of near-identical sites clutter the Web, feeding surfers' seemingly bottomless appetite for online smut.

This makes for tight competition among adult sites. Yet large online porn businesses rely on ma-and-pa operations to feed traffic to their sites through a web of banner ads and affiliation programs, creating something of a Catch-22. "Thousands of teeny tributaries are sending all this traffic to large rivers, which are the large sites. They provide huge affiliate programs," said Tom Hymes, who covers the online industry for the adult trade publication Adult Video News. "One of the problems of this business model is that it seems to me like an inverse pyramid. They're paying out more in the affiliate programs for traffic than they make in one membership."

Nevertheless, he adds, in the endless quest for traffic, they constantly need fresh sites from which to drive traffic to their paid site -- which begs the question, with so much free content out there, why pay? "Certainly there's plenty of traffic. But in terms of people paying for subscriptions, things are pretty limited," said Malcolm Maclachlan, media and e-commerce analyst at International Data Corporation, which does periodical research into the adult online industry. "The paradox is, where money is being made in subscriptions is in the softer more arty end -- Dani's HardDrive and Playboy.com. If you want hardcore porn, it's easy to find a billion pictures in five minutes for free."

The bottom line is that adult webmasters of all stripes are having to pay closer attention to the bottom line. "My impression is that it's hitting people at all levels," said Greg Geelan, president and co-owner of YNOT, a news and community site for adult webmasters. "Most people are flat-lining in revenues or dropping in revenues. You might find a select minority of people who are making more money." In other words, the online porn industry is undergoing the same pains as many other Internet-related businesses.

Flying Crocodile -- a Seattle company that provides software and back-end services to adult webmasters (and owned YNOT until last week) -- is a good example. Three rounds of layoffs in October, December, and January reduced Flying Crocodile's staff of 135 to approximately 40. In January, CEO and co-founder Andrew Edmond resigned, leaving the two remaining co-founders, Ross Perkins and Shawn Boday, to pick up the pieces. "We're pretty much doing what a lot of Internet companies are doing, which is looking at our business model, seeing what makes sense, and deciding what to do in the future," said Perkins.

Perkins and Boday said they will focus only on market-proven ventures, and attempt to draw in more mainstream clients. Flying Crocodile is not alone in rethinking its ways. The stock market, once considered by some adult businesses to be a viable means of raising cash, doesn't appear to be an attractive option these days.

Playboy Enterprises stepped away from plans to spin off Playboy.com as a separate company with its own Nasdaq symbol in November, citing the stock market downturn. Last October, the adult video company Vivid Entertainment told journalists it was planning to go public in order to expand its business into broadband. It has yet to make a move. A Vivid spokeswoman said the plan is still under consideration and refused to comment further. The smattering of adult-related dot-coms that have gone public -- including New Media Frontier and NuWeb Solutions, both on Nasdaq -- are faring about as well as most other high-tech stocks these days, despite rising revenues.

YNOT's Geelan said politics, too, are cutting into online porn's hopes for the future. "People are frightened by (President) Bush and his anti-porn statements. They're scared to death of Ashcroft -- scared he's going to come down on the industry." As a result, Geelan said, fewer players in the adult Web space are willing to become public personas -- like Danni Ashe, who's made appearances on Entertainment Tonight and 48 Hours and who testified before the Commission on Child Online Protection last summer; or Seth Warshavsky of Internet Entertainment Group, who last summer graced the pages of Rolling Stone under the dubious headline "Porn.con?" ."They don't want to become a target for the Justice Department," Geelan said. "They don't want their name out there as much as they used to. There were, and remain, a lot of shady characters in the business. Because they're of scared of prosecutions, they're either getting out of the business or cleaning up their acts."

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