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Montreal, with its reputation for having a plentiful supply of strip clubs, sex shops, massage parlours and escort services, has been called a world capital for online porn.

Those in the estimated US$60-billion global industry say business is booming in this city, but corporate consolidation and the Internet’s endless supply of free content on YouTube-style sites has meant, aside from a few exceptions, that the porn stars have moved out and the computer nerds have moved in.

Bramon, for one, has shifted from producing content to doing marketing, customer service, design, billing and hosting for other companies — basically the entire tech side of the business.

“2016 will be our best year in 17 years,” he said. “’Tubes came in and killed a whole sector of the industry because we were selling something that is free, but it weeded out all of the people who had lousy quality content and paved the way for people with great quality content to make a good living.”

But content needs to be managed and that’s where a lot of the money is to be made.

At an exhibition hall in Montreal’s Bonaventure Hotel in early August, booths with erotic posters for porn sites are propped up next to banners for companies with decidedly unsexy names such as Humboldt Merchant Services and Epoch Payment Solutions.

It is all part of the thirteenth year of Qwebec Expo, a business-to-business conference for tech companies in the adult online industry that host websites, provide anti-fraud services, manage payments and optimize online advertising.