of the runaway hit YouTube. All you have to do is type YouPorn.com and everything imaginable, straight, gay, home-made and studio, simply pops up on the computer screen.

YouPorn already gets more hits than CNN.com and the weather channels, and while Vivid's own tease-and-pay website is ranked 5,061st in 'adult' sites, YouPorn is number one. An investigation by Portfolio, a business magazine, found YouPorn getting a whopping 15m 'unique' visitors a month, which makes it the 51st most popular website of any kind.

There are a couple of snags to all this. The first is that while traffic is great, advertising revenue is not. The second has been pointed

out by Hirsch himself. He tells Portfolio that a mysterious Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Stephen Paul Jones offered to sell him YouPorn for just $20m. Google paid $1.65bn for YouTube.

But Hirsch turned him down: with amateur porn, he explained, you can't regulate the ages of performers or users, and that is courting a 'legal exposure' that can land a porno-king in jail.