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For Abbey Winters who runs an adult website, the hardest part of her job is finding the time to interview and assess job candidates.
"I just wish I could find good people. Everyone wants to work for a porn site but few of them are good. We have an awesome team now but we're always expanding,"she says.
On the other hand, one of the best parts of her job is reading the positive feedback posted on the site by the members who enjoy the content. Winters has a strict "no skanks policy"for her website and all the women featured are average Australian women.
"I was really disappointed by the quality of the material that was out there on the net. People were shooting amateur models but dressing them up to look like porn stars, totally missing the appeal of an amateur model."
It turns out thousands of people agree.
"We're now one of the premier sites around with tens of thousands of members from all over the world, and growing all the time,"she says.
Winters used to work as a lighting technician on films, concerts and the theatre before she decided to launch the site in October 2000.
"It was a big change! For the first year the site was up I still had a regular full-time job."
And while younger people tend to think it's cool and want to know all the details, Winters often has to put up with disapproval from some who don't like what she does for a living.
"Others loose all respect right away,"says Winters. "Like my dentist... ouch!"
While she used to shoot all the photographs and most of the video herself, she is now relegated to a managerial position that sees her running all aspects of the website. Sometimes, like any other office worker, this means being bogged down in paper work, and working long hours.
She starts the day at about 10am by going through the mountain of emails that have piled up during the night and then touches base with her key staff. If there's time she'll go to a shoot. In the afternoon she reviews the raw shots with the photographer and editor for the stills or video clips, then she deals with the day's emails until 11pm when she heads home.
While it might sound like working for an adult website is not that different from working in the average office strange things often do happen. Once during a shoot where a naked model was climbing up a tree, the model grabbed a rotten branch and she fell 10 feet and rolled towards a cliff that dropped into a river.
"Luckily the model stopped herself in time. But we got it all on video; it's on the site. Needless to say, we have some pretty strict safety policies now,"says Winters.
" I guess it's not that weird but not that much weird stuff happens on shoots... once you get over the fact we photograph naked people all the time."
www.abbeywinters.com.au
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