Philip Brandes has experience teaching people, having once started a company to help seniors use the Internet to E-mail and chat with their grandkids.

Now, the ex-Montrealer - a laid off dot.comer with a degree in business economics - has launched a school of a different, much less innocent, kind.

Instead of lamenting the crash of the Internet gravy train, the 27-year-old is turning it into a business opportunity: his Silicon Valley venture, the Adult Webmaster School, turns dot.com casualties into pornmasters.

After getting laid off from a high-tech firm in August, a friend taught him how to make big money in online pornography, Berkeley, Calif.-based Brandes said in an interview. He jumped into the business in April. "I did pretty well with it and I had a lot of friends who were in the same position as I had been - out of work, depressed."

So he started teaching them. As word spread, he was inundated with plaintive

E-mails from jobless dot.com friends and strangers eager to reinvent themselves. Hence, the school, an online tutorial whose Web site puts late-night infomercial pitchmen to shame.

"Get Paid to Look at Porn!" the site yells, claiming graduates earn $500 U.S. to $2,500 U.S. a week, "working only an hour a day!" In small type, however, the opening page notes that "money will not fall from the sky, nor will beautiful women appear from out of thin air." The tuition: $140 U.S. Students learn how to build Web pages featuring free porn, then make money by funneling their visitors to pay-for-porn sites. One hundred students have enrolled since the school opened last month.

Brandes sounds a little sheepish about the school's get-rich-quick pitch, and notes the school offers a money-back guarantee. He uses himself as the school's posterboy, claiming he earns $500 U.S. to $1,000 U.S. a day for the 30 minutes he works on his site daily. He said he recently used the proceeds to buy a Lincoln Navigator SUV.

"I was attracted by the freedom to work short hours and sort of enjoy the rest of the day doing other things," Brandes said, adding he will "net over $100,000 U.S. for the year."

The skills honed by laid-off dot.comers are perfect for online porn, he adds, noting the "recession-resistant industry" is still booming despite the collapse of many Web ventures and gloomy prospects of others.

The contention that porn is a huge, highly profitable business, often repeated by the industry, was recently picked apart by Forbes magazine (see link to Forbes article at end of this story). The conclusion: porn is nowhere near as big or as profitable as generally believed.

That kind of talk doesn't deter Brandes. "There's still a lot of money to be made," he said. "There's something to be said about playing to people's sins."

Brandes, who moved to California in the mid-1980s, launched two Internet-fax companies while at the University of California at Santa Barbara, with the help of cash from his parents, both of whom were entrepreneurs. He sold both firms and co-founded a company that helps the elderly learn the Internet, eventually selling out to his partner. Brandes went on to become head of Web development at a New York-based firm providing computer facilities to retirement communities. It shut down soon after he was laid off last August.

With the dot.com bubble bursting and jobs hard to come by, Brandes's attention was drawn to a high-school friend in Silicon Valley who had been making good money at porn since 1995, while barely working. He convinced that friend and now business partner - Morgan McNerney, 26 - to teach him.

A dot.com star was porn.

"You'd think the stereotypical college frat guy who reads (men's magazines) like Maxim or Playboy would jump at this," Brandes said. "I'm not convinced of that yet. I think our market is the former dot.com people, who know this business, who know the potential of the Internet to make money."

There are plenty of potential students, Brandes figures, considering the number of dot.coms that have gone under, leaving thousands of young, earnest, tech-savvy workers jobless. Neighbouring Emeryville, home to many dot.com startups, "looks almost like a graveyard these days," he said. The school is hoping to entice students by getting the word out on job and message boards frequented by Web workers, past and present. Many dot.com castoffs have Web-building or marketing experience, "so the transition to this job is relatively easy, they know how things work."

Though Brandes said his school is unique, there are several other, free online educational resources for would-be pornmasters, including The Adult Webmaster and Porn Resource.

Brandes's school, for its part, provides hands-on instruction via video tutorials. Students can also use E-mail to ask for personalized help from teachers. They are taught how to build "thumbnail galleries" - free Web pages featuring sexually explicit photographs, plus advertisements for "pay sites," which charge for access to much larger photo and video databases. Students build pages using photos they take themselves or buy from content providers charging about $10 U.S. for 40 pictures. Students are then taught how to get their pages listed free on "thumbnail gallery posts" - huge porn clearinghouses with links to thousands of pages of titillating pictures.

"Essentially, you're an advertiser for pay sites," Brandes notes. The revenue comes from commissions. When one of your visitors clicks on a pay-site ad and subscribes, you get some money. Some sites pay a flat fee of $35. Others give a cut of ongoing revenue: if a visitor subscribes for months, you get a cut as long as he's a member. Monthly fees on such sites run from $30 U.S. to $45 U.S.

With all the freely available porn online, it's getting harder to make money at it, Brandes admitted. But, he noted, his school offers secrets to success, including which fonts and colours to use, and how to organize pictures and ads.

Within three weeks, he said his students are "getting close to 100,000 people per day just to their one little Web page. It's really amazing, traffic-wise." X-rated material "is the No.1 industry on the Web and right now, the distribution of wealth is only among a few," he added. "This industry can definitely handle a lot more people."

Brandes has no qualms about his line of business, and notes child porn, violence and bestiality are not tolerated by most porn Webmasters. He said his sites only promote "soft-core" material. In fact, he said the best-selling dirty pictures are those of "amateurs, everyday people" - albeit naked ones.

And he makes a distinction between people involved in "porno magazines and videos" and the online industry, "which is filled with highly skilled people, some of whom went to very well-known schools and have degrees." Brandes quickly added that he's the product of "a very conservative family and I was on my way to becoming something else - just a normal dot.com entrepreneur, but this appealed to me."

Still, it was only last week, on the day the online magazine Salon.com ran a profile of him, that he fessed up to his parents about his line of work.

"That would be kind of a bad way for them to find out," he said. "They knew something was going on, because I was sort of very quiet about it. Usually, I'm very animated and I like to talk about what I'm doing and this time around, I sort of kept it under the radar. I wanted to make sure it was a success before I told them. They're very supportive and they wish me the best of luck."

Of course, they do have experience putting up with family members in the taboo industry. "I do have an uncle who's been in the business for about four years," Brandes said, referring to the man behind a Montreal-based site featuring salacious videos. "My poor mother - first my uncle, now me."

Sites

- Adult Webmaster School: www.adultwebmasterschool.com

- Forbes: www.forbes.com/2001/05/25/0524porn.html

- Salon: www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/07/03/webmaster