quick update:
Whomever ByteSeller has in charge of their email is... how do I say this... not great at their job. After trying for a week to learn more about their compliance policies, so that I could build the forum website in a way that would comply with any/all of their rules, he just kept parroting that they'd be open to working with us but wouldn't know for sure until I went ahead and built a site that he could send off to his Compliance Department. So, I spent another week putting together a content-based website, sort of like a forum, and started filling it with enough [completely legal] content that one might consider paying to gain access to. I sent him login credentials for their compliance department to use to check everything out, and made it clear that I'd be happy to make changes to adhere to any compliance requirements that I hadn't been made aware of beforehand. Several days later, I hear back that their acquirers declined to accept the website. I immediately asked why, repeating that I was happy to make any required changes in order to move forward. Several days after that, he responded that they only deal with file and video sharing hosting websites, and forums are outside their field of operations... in direct contradiction to what he told me in the very beginning.
I've thought about it, and I can't think of a file or video sharing hosting website (that I have the means to put together) which would make sense for the size of transactions appropriate for getting access to the massive hoard of content people would be getting access to. It would be priced at a minimum of a couple hundred dollars, but I've never seen a file hosting site charge more than $30 a month. That would mean making all transactions come through as annual subscriptions, and I can't imagine that not sending up all kinds of red flags on the backend of the PSP and getting the account quickly shutdown. I thought of signing up for an IPTV whitelabel service and becoming a reseller, providing access links to the additional content through private messages to each subscriber, but ran into the same concerns about the average transaction amount.
@CaptK I know you've been busy for the past month, ever since you mentioned knowing of a couple more PSP's which might support the anonymity requirements of this project. If you find the time to pass along their info, I'd appreciate it. As far as I know, everything for this project is in place except for a way to accept credit card payments.
If anyone else can think of any payment service providers which might allow anonymous payouts, meaning any kind of cryptocurrency, so that we could accept credit cards without having to provide a bunch of KYC documentation and banking info, please feel free to chime in or send me a PM!
The frustrating thing is that I can see the project working really well if we went the traditional route described in the Mentor Group Gold section, setting up a corporate and financial profile with darks in order to get access to high risk merchant accounts, and then running the content-based website as the main business, with the data hoard accessible within a hidden VIP section. But the upfront funds aren't available to get all that setup; they'd only become available as a result of the sales of it.