It dawned on me that I have no idea where these roles are even listed. I have been signed up to job alerts for a decade and never seen anything like it. Yet a lot of the driving force of the internet was adult content.
Did this business illegally post content it did not hold copyright to? If so that the environment is otherwise toxic is not surprising.
It's not exactly the same; skeezy old school porn producers have made way for young amateur porn producers, but it's still relatively the same as what OP refers to.
Some job boards do the work for you by automatically classifying companies by industry. e.g. try filtering by "adult" at JobFluent job board. e.g for Barcelona: https://www.jobfluent.com/jobs-barcelona/adult
However, the same problem applies the other way around. Getting to know what adult websites operate each company is also a problem on its own...
What does that mean? Half his fixed monthly costs are for buying porn?
I would say that there's no specific way to go about hunting for such jobs as they all use the same resources as any other internet companies to find employees, but they do lean more heavily on recruiters. Perhaps ask some recruiters to point you in that direction.
What. How.. What?
What exactly is your friend spending half his money on that he wouldn't need to, if working for an adult website?
Got hired through a recruiter actually.
Word of warning: adult companies are super stingy with programmer salaries and you'll basically be competing against $10/hr offshore amateurs.
Example : "Worked 2 years for PornHub on their porn website."
vs.
"Worked for 2 years for MindGeek on a streaming service network serving up to one million live customers."
I had a quick look on a couple of sites (legitimate research!) but only found a job listing page on pornhub, so actually maybe that's not it. Could it be one of those industries that you have to work in to get to know about more jobs? Seems unlikely, though.
Either way, you have also piqued my interest in this!
Edit: Whilst I was writing this it seems to have been answered!
(edit: guessing Mindgeek given the other comments)
Even smallish blogs doing affiliate marketing for the bigger porn sites can earn you an easy six figure income.
there used to be a couple agencies but they appear to have closed down over the years, just checked their websites.
if you really want to work in the space, just visit some of the links in their footers. you'll start finding out who the parent companies are and how to contact them.