Apparently I'm not the typical producer her (based on past discussions), but my experience has been that the UMD is just another way for people interested in what I do to purchase my videos. I have a small niche within a niche, and a fairly loyal customer base. UMD is just giving my customers an alternative. My sales are too sporadic to say that they changed when UMD let me create a store. As far as I can tell, my sales are primarily driven by how many new clips I generate.

So, my answer to that question is no. A producer who was fighting for market share among lots of producers that produce very similar content might feel differently. Without giving it a lot of thought, I agree that a split probably would not be helpful to anyone, at this time. It might have helped me if it had been don that way from the beginning, though. MANY of my customers won't buy here because the UMD has a reputation for being homophobic, but that is another matter, altogether.

 

Cloud WAM, great idea.
Seriously though I would not be a producer of any type without UMD I would just be a fan. I could never set up a members site of my own because of lack of resource (also referred to as money ) and because I could not guarantee any sort of regular content updates, personally speaking I think the membership model is outdated and even restrictive as many members myself included waver at making the commitment of cost to obtain what could turn out to be one photoset or clip that I like for maybe £20 or £30 but I have bought quite a few individual clips and when the clip is really good I have happily paid £15 for it alone.
As an amateur the great thing about the UMD store is you can just give it a go, see how it goes all at no cost, if it works out and you get a hit (I sold 175 copies of my clips in the short time they were here, Ta MM ) then everyone involved benefits plus you have the publicity generated through UMDs vast user base on the forums.
I like to think of UMD as a big clubhouse with a club shop attached not a supermarket with a cafe.
So whatever you do please do not loose what has been achieved so far

Thanks Jonn

 

And that's really all we hope to be. Most of the stuff here is also available elsewhere. I have a forum but there are other forums out there too, and I link to them. Same with chat, links, and the download store itself. The stuff we have here is just our rendition; our offering. I guess UMD is like that lady's Winchester house our in CA that never stops being built and added onto. But if you get too big or get too many ideas, I guess people feel infringed upon, or start suspecting ulterior motives. But that won't stop me from still offering the best site I know how to!

 

Is it to late to grab some popcorn?

A lot of info, I have been following in this thread to take in.

Regards,
--Chris

Well again, I'm the shithead!

But before I sign off, please note that I did not call "this entire enterprise" dishonest. I merely stated that "your Directory listings would be honest".

Likewise, I did not feel as though I was competing with you but pointing out that your directory had turned a corner and started competing with my sites, and others.

And let's not feel too offended eh? You can at least take comfort in knowing that it's not you who is a brick and mortar, hateful, film photographer!



Well, now you know.

 

No, that distinction goes to me. I'm still annoyed that digital has not only lowered the barriers to entry, but lowered our standards in photography. Messmaster's beloved, tiny sensors produce nearly infinite depth of field, so nobody even knows what hyperfocal distance, or selective focus even mean. The old adage, "expose for shadows and develop for highlights" has been replaced with "point, shoot, and photoshop". People want to know how many mega-pixels your camera records, as if that is any measure of photographic quality. Composition and lighting are lost on most "photographers".

I made my living for 3 years as a serious photographer and darkroom technician, back when photography required skill and 35mm was considered low quality (1980-83). When digital came along, 35mm was the gold standard. That's pretty funny to someone who learned to shoot weddings on a Mamiya RB67 that had roughly 4 times 35mm resolution, and I knew people shooting on 5x7 negatives.

And now, people are being told that their mobile phones can compete with a real camera shooting through real glass. If you don't know what lens resolution, depth of field, aperture, and compression artifacts are, then you'd better not come around telling me that a pinhole camera with a fixed aperture, a 1/4 inch sensor, and a 20-to-1 compression ratio are going to take the place of my Nikon DSLR with high quality glass, shooting in RAW mode.

But then, people are looking at their photos on their iPhones, so who even cares about quality?

So now you know, I'm the snob.

 

Thanks for letting me know. But I will let the community speak. If the consensus is that something just should not be here, and people really start to resent the way it is going, I'll of course listen to their voices. I always listen to the producers too, but I can't have a vocal minority being over-represented, resulting in my taking away things that the majority of visitors, and amateur and professional producers enjoy. I can't put too much weight on people saying that my directory listings are dishonest (or implying so by stating what I need to do to make them honest), just because there is ecommerce on the same site. I still believe the root of your problems with UMD stem from competition that started, like you said, when it "turned the corner" of ecommerce. Well it's not going back. Haters gonna hate.

 

That sure is true! People just take pictures and just don't know what the heck they're doing, and camera developers are encouraging them to just mindlessly take pictures while camera software insufficiently tries to doctor up the poor images. Garbage in, garbage out. Just look at the over-processed iPhone images. Maybe my head is in the clouds, but I still think there is room for all of it. Why not let the people who have no interest in professional photography just use their little toys to capture moments out with friends, a nice sunset they happened to see while out walking, or whatever. Then if they wanna capture a wam session, and that Canon Powershot is all they have, then they'll use it. My standards have not changed; I still know and appreciate a good picture when I see one. But I, even as a professional, still love to see when amateurs get to have some fun too. It's not skin off my back. It's a little hard for us producers sometimes to realize that not every image is created for aesthetic reasons. Sometimes 99% of the reason for a picture or video is to just capture what's going on in the scene. And that's all a lot of people care about. That's why so many fuzzy VHS scan videos can sell more than the HD stuff sometimes.

 

People can do whatever they want for their own gratification. My problem is with people who claim to be professionals, but they have to rely on their preview and trial and error to set up a manual flash. When I got my Nikon D70s, I spent 20 minutes reading about the Flash Commander feature and trying to understand why it was necessary. I've gotten into arguments with "professionals" who didn't understand that they could not use their shutter speed setting to adjust the light from their strobe. I could go on for days, but it seems to me that you should have a certain level of proficiency and knowledge to call yourself a professional.

 

You're absolutely right, finally.




Wow you just can't let the name calling go, can you?

 

Devils advocate time...

You know why it's saturated right? Because you are enabling it to be saturated.

Simple as.

Right or wrong... I sit on the fence. I am now an incumbent, and I was pissing off the incumbents when I started by taking advantage of cheaper and more widely available technology to get in the game.

So, I find it hard to bitch that i am now in an overly saturated market. Doesn't mean i don't feel it - like others, I have worked hard to make stuff happen. When I started I had to form a company, do a shitload of paperwork to get a CC solution happening then build the website by hand. I had to learn to get the best out of equipment and pay top dollar for a computer that could do it.

No anyone with a $150 camera and $350 laptop can be selling shit the same day.

The barrier to entry there has gone.

The real problem is it does nothing for quality. The bit that DOES piss me off is having to compete with low quality shite. from any Tom, Dick or Harry that hasn't got to work on what they are doing.

Things like setting up a CC processor takes work and a little money - the barrier of commitment.

Now with themothership and UMD dl store that barrier to entry is also gone.

My worry in that is someone turns up on the UMD and drops some cash on a bunch of videos that look good and they turn out to be shit. That is seriously going to effect them to come back and purchase again.

That is what I dislike about the whole situation.

On the other hand, stuff gets easier for me... but I also feel like I have to play.

There is also the big advantage of knowing what you are doing for the long term. Having a site of your own with good SEO is something a lot of people calling themselves producers simply don't understand, let alone how to control costs and cash control.

Out of the crap as well will be the producers that would have gotten over the barrier to entry, not having it enables them to progress and learn faster. Problem for them is, the shit producers can churn the same old shit and rely on new customers because they don't make new videos.


The two examples I will give is someone like Messy-Jessie who has just worked and worked and improved and improved into one of the best producers around right now - and I will bet money the UMD DL store is a big part of that.

On the other hand you have another producer who can't even hold a camera straight let alone light a scene still in business on the basis he gets the occasional pretty model and doesn't have to actually do anything on the technical side because it's all handed on a plate.

That's why i sit on the fence.

That stuff isn't going to go away by the look of it, so i will use the new features and they will enable some good people. Hopefully the opportunists and the lazy will be corrected at some point by the market.

 

I second all that, but my market segment is so small, I would have never gotten into selling videos on-line at all, if the barriers to entry had not been low. I use high end equipment, but that's because my business also shoots commercial video. I have a website, but that's because I'm a website developer, and I've been sharing my muddy adventures on-line for 15 years. However, I set up my store on Clips4Sale before UMD offered stores here, and that did not cost anything to set up. At one time, I could sell DVDs on PayPal. The barriers to on-line sales of adult videos have been low for a long time. The UMD did not change the game. Furthermore, the Internet/e-commerce/technology trend is clear; if you can't differentiate yourself with a better product and superior marketing, you will be overrun.

 

Exactly.

The great thing is that anyone can make and sell messy videos.

The problem is ANYONE can make and sell messy videos.

The UMD did change the game I think, if I didn't have a focused ready made market to advertise to, i never would have gotten my project off the ground. Then themothership followed by the UMD has opened up the game to anyone with a cheap camera and laptop.

It's pretty much undeniable. Even if it does mean a lot of us have to up our game big time, it's a changer.

Making people up their game isn't a bad thing... except the crap still seems to be about now matter how much you get better it seems right now.

As I said, hopefully it will come.

 

The main revelation I am taking away from this thread is that many of you can apparently type about a hundred times faster than me

TheMothership was created in 1998 as a promo site for a Tacoma, WA concert venue. I eventually started (badly) doing websites for 3rd parties and when the venue closed, I kept the name and turned it into a web hosting company. Thanks to another club that needed a draw to attract customers on weeknights, I ended up having access to weekly mud wrestling events, which I taped, edited, and sold on eBay in VHS tape and Video CD format. I started with a cheapo security camera plugged into a $100 VCR and a hand-held VHS-C camcorder from the discount table at Best Buy. My editing equipment was Vegas 3 on an 800mhz AMD Duron laptop with 128 megs of memory. Except for Vegas (which beats ALL other editors), the words "amateur" and "pure shit" don't begin to describe the humble beginnings of The Mothership Media Empire. The "barrier to entry" was enormous back then. It took me a couple of months to even master the process of getting analog video into a digital format that made it reasonably easy to produce Video CDs, and then had to relearn it all over again when I switched to DVDs (which were a couple of bucks apiece for blanks back then) a little while later.

Once eBay and PayPal got out of the nudity business, I was forced to come up with my own system. At the time, (2003) there were no "frameworks" like Drupal or Wordpress. In fact PHP was barely functional. Turnkey store systems were either expensive, half-assed, or insanely complex, so I hunkered down with Perl and rolled my own.

Fortunately I had a few different day & night jobs to pay the bills or I never would have gotten off the ground, let alone where I am today. I was able to convince a real bank that I was a viable risk for a real merchant account, which was considerably cheaper than 3rd-party processors like CCbill and set up a membership system and a primitive catalog store. By 2004, things were rolling along and I had even managed to pick up a few clients in the form of several of the old veterans of the Wam World. The UMD was in a previous incarnation and I believe still used PhpBB forum. After the particular hell I endured putting together a functional system essentially constructed from "bear skins and stone axes" (obligatory ST-TOS reference) I decided that no one else should have to go thru that, especially if they were willing to pay me a little something to help them avoid it

In 2005, I noticed that C4S had a pretty good thing going with their new little download system, but I hated the look of it. (I still do) Having already ripped off aspects of eBay and Amazon.com to design the look and feel of my DVD catalog, I decided to add a few more fields and adapt it to downloads in the form of Vidown.com.

I originally started getting some grief from the old guard about making it too easy for newbies and amateurs to open a store and how downloads were cannibalizing their membership sites and DVD stores. (sound familiar?) I explained that I am a capitalist, not a corporatist/monopolist, and I don't believe in protectionism. I guess that's from having moved around constantly as a kid and changing career directions 3 or 4 times in my younger days. I had to prove myself constantly and got used to clawing my way back to the top after every change. It's pretty much who I am now and I choose to view innovation and competition by others as exciting potential game-changers, not threats to my well-being.

When MM created the UMD download store, some of my clients were worried and wondered what I was going to do about it. I decided to compete As it turns out, the UMD's super-easy system took a lot of unnecessary load off my hands in the form of complete techo-noobs. My system is pretty intuitive, but it still requires a lot of basic computer knowledge in order to use it properly - things like understanding file systems and filename conventions, using FTP, knowing how to edit images and video and the subtleties of generating web/download-friendly formats amid a sea of confusing and ever-changing options. The UMD system does some of that for the user and the customers who are exclusive to it would have probably had a more difficult time learning my system. I think it has been really helpful for those people and it allowed me to concentrate more on tightening up security and overall code efficiency over the last year than on adding more "user-friendly" features.

Unfortunately, MM keeps raising the bar so now I have to knuckle down and improve my systems some more, maybe finding some needs that he is not filling or markets that he's not serving.

Most of what we are all doing here today did not exist one or two decades ago and in 5 years, all of us in this business might be in the rear-view mirror of whatever new technologies are ruling the world then. I'm looking forward to the brain implants so I don't even have to type anymore

 

I could not have said that more eloquently. I think competition is a good thing, and I don't just say it, I live by it. Where else besides this community do you see competing businesses actually linking to each other and supporting each other and working with each other? I use Patrick's system to take payments, and he moderates this forum! I don't know if helping competition is good business practice, but it just seems right to me.

 

Ha... I forgot to say in my other reply that if you need help, let me know. I've built a LOT of shit on UMD's backend to make all this stuff work, so if you're doing your stuff in PHP, let me know if you need a function or something.

 

I hear it, I really do. Fuck, I was one of the annoyers of the original vanguard... it was only ever time before I became one. My survival plan is to keep getting better.

Another problem facing us is the same one facing a lot of hobbies that can become professions. Photography is one of the most obvious ones. A lot of amateur hobby photographers out there who have never had the balls to go it alone but just lost their jobs... and going for it.

It's the kind of thing hurting a lot of things that are based on non essential goods. The market has shrunk due to basic economics over the past 1-2 years as the worlds economy is falling flat on it's face.

When markets that are shrinking are also being saturated... the only people laughing are the guys taking a cut of every sale.

When it bounces back up and a few big producers have already thrown in the towel and moved on...

I'm not digging at you Soundguy and MessMaster - you have both made hell of a things.

I would just caution to you look after your long term and higher grossing peoples now while you lower the entry barriers. Maybe look towards encouraging their bottom lines s a bit more than the Have-A-Go-Ers.

Of course, the Have-A-Go-Ers that prove to become decent fixtures should then be looked after a bit better.


I for one would like to see a bit more of a meritocracy than a free for all. That's very much in tune with the capitalism of it all.

 

I've been following this thread since the start, here's my tuppence worth, this may be a bit disjointed as it's answering different bits of lots of stuff:

Quality: This means different things to different people. To me a quality scene is one where, as long as the basics of decent light and steady camera-work are there, what matters is the content. Not how many $ the camera cost. When I buy a WAM video I want to clearly see a fully clothed girl having fun getting gunged, and I want to be able to see her lower half get gunged as well as her top half.

If the girl's sitting down and the camera zooms in on her head as the mess is poured over her, that scene to me is a miss and I won't buy it. I want to see her skirt or trousers getting the goo. Give me a scene shot on a decent domestic camcorder held steadily with half-decent light, where I can see what I want to see, and I'll buy that over someone else's head-shot, regardless of their $10,000 camera.

I know that some producers shoots amazing quality in terms of crystal clear imagery, but for my tastes their girls mostly don't wear enough, so I've never bought from them. I've bought gunge-throwing scenes from one site only to find that you can't actually see the mess landing in the girl's lap because she crossed her legs as the scene started and the camera operator didn't raise the camera to see over the crossed legs, which reduces my likelyhood to make further purchases.

These things may not matter to other people - each fetishist will have his or her own set of "scene must have X,Y, and Z or not buying" - but the real driver of sales is content, not cinema-standard image quality. Most people will be watching their purchases on normal-sized computer screens, or even on smartphones. Fetish stuff is something usually enjoyed in private after all.

Doesn't matter if someone hires Pinewood Studios, has Kate Moss, Victoria Beckham, Lady Gaga, and whoever's hot from London Fashion Week as models, and shoots the scenes from a dozen angles with $300,000 cameras, lit by a Hollywood expert and using an entire Olympic-sized swimming pool full of liquid chocolate, and then sells the scenes for $2 each. If the girls are in bikinis, mini-skirts, or nude, I'm not going to buy the scenes. If they're in real clothes but you never get to see their legs and bums get messy, I'm not going to buy the scenes. If they start to take their clothes off before they are fully gunged, I'm not going to buy the scenes. If they're wearing low-waist or hipster trousers, I'm not going to buy the scenes.

Aside: In my book anyone who describes low-rise denim shorts as "Daisy Dukes" should be sued under the Trades Description Act - Daisy Duke wore high-waist jeans and shorts, as horrible low-rise jeans hadn't been invented when the Dukes Of Hazard was shot.

Content is king, and fetishes tend to be very personal, precise, and exacting things. I sometimes think a lot of people in this business forget that. A producer once commented that a particular wedding dress scene hadn't sold well, when people were asking for more wedding dresses. I looked at the samples and it was obvious the model started to take the dress off before it was fully gunged - which is a showstopper for me as a fully-clothed WAM fan, and from that scene's disappointing sales, presumably to others too.

Regarding the issue of whether MM should run download stores or not, here's how I see it:

The more the UMD develops, the more reason people have to come here. The more reason they have to come, the more chance they'll see any given producer's updates and adverts. And like a good shopping centre, the more stores there are, the more visitors overall the site (and its adverts) will get. So more downloads available, whether from top-end pro producers, handycam amateurs, or people in between, means more traffic, which means more potential sales for everyone.

In bricks-and-mortar retail they talk about "footfall". How many people come through the doors. More people generally means more paying customers.

Plus, if you have a store on the UMD it's not as if MM is pocketing all the cash - you still get the 70%, and with no storage or bandwidth costs. Sure, having your own merchant account probably gives a lot more than 70% of the sales to you, but if you have to pay for server hosting, and/or pay people to build and maintain a website (I do my own on my own machines, and it takes serious time to keep it up to the line, despite the massive automation I've built in), then by the time you've done all that you probably have less than 70% of the sales figure left.

I also strongly suspect that if there wasn't a UMD, there'd be a much smaller market for WAM material in general. Not many niche fetishes have the advantage of a huge portal like this one, they have to take what they can get from the big commercial porn producers who may happen to dabble a bit in kinky stuff round the edges.

So yeah, as an independent producer with my own site, and a d/l store here, I want to see MM go on developing and expanding and adding to the UMD, as we should all gain more sales overall as a result, both for sites and d/ls.

 

In the interest of historical correctness, hip huggers (low waisted jeans) first became popular around 1960 and went out of fashion in the late 70's/80's. I do, however, agree that Daisy Dukes should be high waisted, and crotch length.

I also concur with all of your other points, in that we all have very specific requirements, and content trumps quality, unless the quality is so bad it is unwatchable. I've even seen some nearly unwatchable clips that really brought it home for me. All else being equal, my old eyes still prefer a clear, steady and well lighted picture. I'd still rather purchase 2nd hand DVDs for $2 each than buy Blueray versions for 5 times as much (or more). It's the same damn movie, and the experience is the same in standard definition as it is in high definition. A bad movie is still a bad movie, regardless of how many pixels, dimensions, or surround sound channels it has.

I love that we can all sell movies here. And here is another analogous point that slipped my mind ... I let my partners sell some of my movies in their own stores (e.g. Heather Blake, Stormy Night), so they can collect money from their sales directly. That would not be possible if it weren't for Derek's instant download store model.

 

Interesting, thank you, I didn't know that. Hip huggers must have gone before I started paying attention to what women wore, at about age 9, in the mid-to-late 70s. In that era it was all high waist jeans and jumpsuits, styles I love to this day.



That's a good point. It also makes it much easier to experiment with side projects, where you can stick some experimental stuff up in a separate download store just to see how it does, without having to do a bunch of coding or setting up payment gateways for a new website.