It looked like a surefire formula for a financially successful Web site. "Sports and sex -- you'd think you couldn't really lose," Scott Coffman says. His allnudesports.com featured daily 15-minute sportscasts anchored by naked women, with a sprinkling of comedy skits based on the latest scandals in the sports world.

The sportscasts were delivered via streaming, the technology CNN and other media companies use to play video and sound over their Web sites. Its launch was greeted with much ballyhoo: Fox News and other national outlets did stories, and the site claimed more than 6 million visitors a month. Advertisers signed on - mostly other adult sites, online casinos and Viagra pushers. Some used banner ads. Others had the nude anchors make their pitch.

But in nine months, allnudesports.com was dead. Its set, hidden in a Charlotte office park, was dismantled. No more strippers as anchors, no more skits, no more nude wrestling. The naked grapplers had become a Friday staple in preparation for a spinoff -- allnudewrestling.com.

The founder and president of AEBN Inc., which launched allnudesports.com in September 2001, sings a familiar dot-coin dirge in explaining his site's failure. "The ad market is completely gone," Coffman says. Prices for banner ads declined from $8 to 50 cents per 1,000 clicks on the site.

Not that he had ever planned for the Web site to be a moneymaker. Its purpose was to channel customers to Coffman's other business -- AEBN -- and it did that. Those initials stand for Adult Entertainment Broadcast Network, and it doesn't mix replays with its foreplay. AEBN sells pay-per-minute porno online. Coffman came up with it after trying -- and failing -- to get rich by making and selling board games, comic books and sports memorabilia, among others things.

He predicts that AEBN, started in May 2000, will generate $10 million in sales this year -- up 400% from 2001. "The show wasn't a terrible strain, but AEBN's board of directors wanted profitability now," Coffman says. Pulling the plug on ailnudesports.com, combined with the increase in sales, allowed the company to turn a profit in May, he says.

What makes Coffman's sites different from other online porn purveyors is its ability to charge by the minute, thanks to proprietary software. It works like this: Web surfers purchase blocks of time, from 15 minutes for $3.95 to 300 minutes for $29.95. They can use their time to watch one video or dozens, with unused time being saved for later viewing. The reason for the setup is simple: "Guys tend to not want to watch the whole movie." About 2,000 people a day make purchases, he says, with the average being 100 minutes, at $11.95.

AEBN's offices are in the same small office park that used to house allnudesports. Across one street is a bakery thrift store; across another, a vegetable-oil refinery. Black construction paper covers glass on the doors. Inside, in the waiting room, six sickly plants are arranged haphazardly. A painting of a tiger adorns one wall. A stuffed tiger sits on the receptionist's desk. There is no significance. Somebody just likes tigers.

Coffman emerges from behind a door, which bears a sign: "This room is private -- knock before entering." He's not what you would expect from a porn lord. Forget Hugh Hefner's smoking jacket and Bob Guccione's gold chains. He wears beat-up jeans and a faded green polo shirt. He looks younger than his 40 years. And he speaks with a slight lisp. He didn't set out to go into smut, though he feels no pangs of guilt about it. "I didn't really think it would be fun or entertaining. I saw it as a way to make money."

A native of Charleston, W.Va., he had more mainstream aspirations while growing up. "I wanted to be a stockbroker." He graduated from Marshall University in 1984 with a bachelor's in economics. Along the way, however, he learned something that turned him away from a career as a broker. "I don't like to talk on the phone."

After graduation, he decided he had to get out of economically depressed West Virginia to launch a career. "Charlotte was the closest point to Charleston that seemed to be growing. And it had great weather." Once there, he waited tables and tended bar, plowing his spare cash into sidelines. He tried to publish a comic geared toward fans of The Far Side. "I did the writing and contracted for the art." He sold a few books but couldn't find any newspapers willing to purchase the comic as a regular feature. "All we did was get lots of rejection letters." He also tried to market a board version of quarter bounce, the drinking game. His hook was putting college logos on the boards, but he forgot to get permission from the schools. "They busted us pretty quickly."

He met Kim Smith, a UNC Charlotte graduate who was a marketing manager for Guinness, while tending bar at Loafers, a Charlotte eatery. (He later became partowner.) She, too, wanted to own a business and jumped into his search for a sideline. They sold T-shirts and herbal supplements. They tried to develop a cell-phone directory and paintball games for kids -- without the balls, using washable paint and low-power squirt guns.

All their ideas tanked until 1993. That's when a friend -- Coffman won't identify her -- who works for Creative Loafing, a Charlotte weekly newspaper, gave them a tip. Two acquaintances of hers who worked at a similar Tampa, Fla., weekly had taken advantage of their paper's decision not to carry ads for sex businesses -- strip clubs, dirty bookstores, escort services and the like -- by creating a magazine dedicated to the seamy, but lucrative, niche.

Coffman flew to Florida to meet them and entered into a joint venture with Tampa-based Stray Cat Communications to publish V2, a Carolinas edition of their magazine. The first issue appeared just six weeks later. He kept working part time at Loafers, and he and Smith ran the magazine out of their apartment, selling ads, writing stories and sending it to Tampa for printing. They delivered it themselves to about 50 strip clubs in North and South Carolina.

It's still published, 88 pages monthly, with a print run of 40,000. A recent issue featured articles about a motorcycle rally in Winston-Salem and an auto show in Charlotte, erotic poetry, explicit personals and photos of topless dancers -- lots of them. It has a glossy cover, but inside it's mostly newsprint, heavy on photos and light on text. No one picks up it up for the articles, anyway. It's distributed free in strip clubs, generating about $30,000 in monthly ad revenue with a 10% to 15% profit margin.

But Coffman and Smith kept looking for a business of their own. In 1995, he had another conversation with his friend at Creative Loafing. This time, she suggested he should look into businesses on the Web. So he bought his first computer and started studying. "We looked at the Internet as a hybrid mail-order catalog. When we looked at what products to sell, the category with the most opportunity was adult. People are going to have sex."

Coffman launched privatevideos.com, an online catalog, in 1995 from his apartment. His bedroom was his office, and the rest of the apartment served as the warehouse, with wire shelves everywhere, stacked with videos and other merchandise. "If major video stores had come in early, there never would have been a position for me. If the people who had the inventory -- producers or wholesalers -- had set up these big Internet sites, I never could have competed."

With no budget for advertising, he set up his site so it would pop up at the top of site lists created by search engines such as Yahoo. By creating lots of links to other pages and registering with the top search engines, he spurred enough traffic to generate a peak of about $2,500 a day in sales of videos and sex toys. But he still wasn't getting rich.

The following year, he tried another mainstream product. The Carolina Panthers were beginning their their first season in Charlotte. He decided to borrow an idea from fans in Pittsburgh, who had for years waved Terrible Towels at Steelers' games. Coffman created Growl Towels. He had learned from the quarters game fiasco. He signed a licensing agreement with the team and the National Football League to use the logo and secured a sponsor, Keffer Chrysler-Plymouth-Dodge, to help with production costs. He gave away 100,000 Growl Towels at an early season home game against San Francisco. After that, he started selling them. The Panthers made an unlikely run to the playoffs, and that helped sell 50,000. Coffman ordered 10,000 more.

But during the week before a big game against Dallas, team officials told Coffman they were switching to a new towel, called the Prowl Towel, distributed by a different vendor. "We got screwed. Those last 10,000 towels were where our money was going to be. I went out there anyway hawking them before the game. I probably sold 500 before being told to leave." He estimates he lost $20,000.

He married Smith in 1997 and kept looking for the right business. The marketplace for privatevideos.com was beginning to get crowded. "The only way I thought we could be profitable on the Internet was to be first in marketing something." Competition for selling adult videos was one thing, but even worse was distribution. "We realized how much more profitable it would be if we could get the product to someone without shipping costs."

By 1999, he had seen online streaming and realized it could be a way around the shipping problem. But he needed to be able to charge viewers by the minute, not by the movie. "The technology didn't exist. There were no mainstream sites doing it because there was no market for The Lion King by the minute." He went to Jay Stroud, whom he had just hired as a techie for privatevideos.com. Stroud created the software, and so far, Coffman says, no one has been able to copy it. And because he uses streaming technology, customers can't pirate what they watch.

But he still needed capital. By then, "people were starting to realize the Internet wasn't going to make everyone rich." He found his first investor -- Pete Manos, owner of a strip club in Greenville, S.C. -- through Kim Coffman, who had met him while distributing V2. "I felt what Scott said was sound business," Manos says. "His idea, how to obtain adult movies through the Internet, is what made it successful."

Manos, 47, also owns apartment complexes in the Carolinas and Georgia and an automobile-painting business. He used his contacts to find nine more investors, including a banker, an insurance salesman and a jeweler. Together, they ponied up $400,000. "It's not an illegal product. Truth is, business is business. And businessmen look at things like I do, strictly from the dollar end. It didn't matter if we were selling widgets." Even so, neither Manos nor Coffman would identify their partners. Coffman launched AEBN in May 2000. He has gone back to his investors for another $400,000 but still holds a 40% stake. His biggest expense has been computer-storage space, as the company needs huge hard drives to store the videos. AEBN offers about 8,000 titles.

Getting the videos was another problem. He didn't want to have to buy the rights. So he borrowed a strategy from movie-rental king Blockbuster and proposed sharing revenue with producers. The trick was getting filmmakers to sign on. In the end, he had to give up 20% of revenue, per video. One of the first to come aboard was Hillsborough-based PHE, an adult mail-order and video-production company which operates as Adam & Eve ("The XXX Files," March 1999).

After expenses including payroll for 45 employees, Coffman's margin is about 10%. He hopes sales and profits will increase as Internet users switch from dial-up service to faster, more-expensive broadband connections. AEBN's movies will play over dial-up connections, but broadband improves image quality. Now, about half of AEBN's customers have broadband connections.

But more broadband and more demand should bring more competition. Coffman claims not to be worried. He says no one else has the software to charge by the minute, and his site is linked to enough others to guarantee traffic. Startup costs, at least $800,000, could scare away some entrants. Plus, he thinks major media companies that have the cash to overtake him won't offer porn as hardcore as his.

"Someone like DirecTV [a satellite television service], they're not doing bondage movies or gay titles, fetish. It will be hard to compete with me if they are just offering straight movies, and I'm packaging everything. Do they want to be known as a company that's making money on all of these weird fetishes? They won't want to go that far, and that's where the money is."

Coffman doesn't mind going that far, but "everything" is a bit of hyperbole. He won't sell snuff films, kiddie porn or movies depicting rape. He may not sell family fare, but AEBN is, after all, a family affair. His wife is his partner in the business, as well as its accountant. Even his parents back in West Virginia give him moral support. "They love it. They don't care about the business. To them, anything that's going to let me pay my own bills is a good thing."

When it was operating, allnudesports.com sponsored a bowling team for Coffman's father, Earl, in Charleston. The site's name was emblazoned in black letters across the backs of red polyester shirts. "He wanted it to say AEBN, but I made him go with All Nude Sports just to torment him."

Steve Goldberg is a free-lance writer based in Charlotte.