After 29 years producing wetlook media I am wondering whether tastes have changed today, from what they used to be in the 1990's. Tastes seem to be a little different today than what they used to be. It would be interesting to see what the new polling results are.

MK

Only 24 more hours to cast your preference vote before the poll ends.

So far the hidden stats are more revealing than the publish poll stats...i.e.

I sent the links to this poll to 4000-5000 wet fans, via this forum, Nigel's wetlook forum, my Twitter followers, and my website contacts. Of that population, only 89 people (2%) took the pool and 98% were not interested in taking the poll. I asked why 98% were not even interested in taking the poll and number one reason I was given by many people was that most wet fans do not like to register at UMD in order to take a poll. So...that indicates the number one most important thing to 98% of wetlook fans is PRIVACY not preference.....so they prefer to remain private about their interests.

The 2nd interesting hidden stat is that the wetlook fans that ARE registered at UMD and able to see the poll.....shows that 521 UMD people so far have viewed the poll.....but only 89 people decided to express their opinion. This shows that 17% of UMD registered people read the message and were interested to express their opinion, but 83% of them decided not to take the poll.....so that perhaps indicates that most wetlook fans are complacent and will accept anything they see, and that 83% are just casual spectators who have no opinion.

MK

Honestly, I don't find any of that very surprising.

Nor do I these days.... complacency seems to be the current trend. But it has not always been that way, because wet fans used to be far more "engaged" in their interests in the 1990's....in the era when there was no such thing as free media and Youtube. The gamechanger seems to be the year that Youtube launched, in 2005. Prior to 2005 wetlook was relatively rare and much more highly valued. After Youtube launched it became as common as apple pie, and therefore it was devalued as we were flooded with millions of wetlook videos....

......so now we are in the era of "Meh !"

Wetlook fans today are like a passenger who just missed the bus....

"Meh......there will be another one coming along soon".

Let me preface this by saying that while you are probably older than me, Mark, I'm not far behind you. And while I am one of the 'complacent' ones that viewed your poll and didn't take it, your conclusions don't apply to me. Nor do any of the Poll options available to me, which is the main reason I didn't answer.

Your poll, though, did make me stop and spend a significant amount of time trying to understand what answer I might have considered selecting, had it been there. (Spoiler Alert: I didn't come up with one)

Over the last 20 years I have purchased the most material from Eurowam, Leon's various incarnations and most recently Wetlooker. If you limit yourself to 'Girls', Dima's website currently lists just over 13,500 downloads to choose from. A quick check on my storage device informs me that I have purchased approximistely 1.25% of those. That Information is relevant because my interests are exclusively wetlook and exclusively girls.

Ten years ago I spent most of my money on Eurowam wetlook videos. They still sell them, of course, but I have found less and less that I was interested in owning. I'm not convinced I really know why, but I have some thoughts; First, early on there were a very few girls I really connected with. Probably close to half of the Eurowam media I have is of those girls. However, that is not to say that I bought everything they made. The clothing style was also very important. I am one of those that got bitten by the wetlook somewhere between 10 and 12 years old and my tastes have always leaned more toward formal.

As a quick aside, one of my earliest and most vivid wetlook memories was of a woman in a waterski show. She was skiing while dressed as a Southern Belle with an enormous hoop skirt. For the 30 or so seconds she was on the TV that Saturday I wanted so badly for her to lose her balance and fall. After learning to waterski as a teenager I realized how easy it is to just glide along on two skis in the boat's wake. I suppose if a wetlook producer made such a video today (and she *did* fall), I would almost surely buy it in a heartbeat!

Eurowam still makes formal content. I know at least part of the reason I don't buy it comes down to the girls. None of them are ugly by any means, but there is something that just doesn't appeal to me. One obvious example for me is tattoos. I actually see very few on Eurowam, but they can be very prevalent on Wetlooker. If it covers a significant amount of their exposed skin I scroll right by! The other things are clearly very subtle and I haven't figured them out yet. That's not to say I don't connect with *any* wetlook models any more. There are a few on Wetlooker that I really enjoy. So much so that I have purchased some jeans videos of a couple of them. That is very much a rarity for me!

To review, I'm picky about the clothing and I'm picky about the girls wearing it. Something of a wetlook snob, I suppose.

What I find even more interesting, though, is that once I've watched the video and/or scrolled through the pictures a few times I probably won't go back and view them again. There are a few I wish I had never bought, but in the vast majority of cases I still feel it was worth it. This is not a scientific observation at all, but off the top of my head I'd say that the amount of purchased media I go back to more than a handful of times is less than 5%. This is the reason streaming options don't appeal to me.

Considering how much content gets posted and how little of it actually interests me at all, I find it surprising how often I check to see if anything new has been added to UMD or Erik's forum. Usually several times a day. It seems safe to say that I'm still "suffering" from the bug that bit me so early in life.

Lastly, Mark's observation that the tipping point occurred when YouTube came along doesn't apply to me either. I click on many of the links that get posted, but I don't recall ever downloading a YouTube wetlook video.

In conclusion, I feel I am very much an outlier. The vast majority of what's available interests me not at all and that number may be slowly dropping. What I do find, though, still stirs my Soul! For that reason this little diatribe does nothing to disprove Mark's conclusions about the poll and what it may mean. The only thing I can say with any certainty is that very few posts here at UMD have been able to get me to respond at all. Doing so at 2:30 in the morning because I happened to wake up and check my phone is truly astounding!

Gee...where were you from 1995 to 2002. Did you contact me in those days. I do not recognize your name handle. FYI 1995 to 2002 were the years I became interested in wetlook events during water ski shows and spent several years traveling to film water ski shows on my camcorder. I first became interested (and then frustrated) after watching Show Ski events that were broadcast on the ESPN cable channel each year. The TV broadcasts never showed interesting shots because they would edit a 3 day tournament of Show Ski performances down to 1hr of mere "snippets" from these events. They never showed many close up shots, it was mostly all shot from a very long distance, and they never showed the bits where the skiers fell off into the water....so those TV broadcasts were useless for providing any nice shots, and the only thing I learned was....that old adage...."it you want the job done properly.....do it yourself"....and so I decided it was best for me to attend some of these events and film them myself, and then I could get the close ups and all the falling in the water shots that ESPN would always edit out of their broadcast.

As I live in Florida I already filmed the theme park water ski show at Cypress Gardens (which since went bankrupt and was taken over by Legoland) and at Seaworld Orlando (which has since dropped all water ski shows....but once hosted the making of the "Jaws 3" water ski scenes). We also had 4 other water ski clubs in Florida with shows that I attended....but there are not many water ski show clubs in Florida. The real center of Water Ski Shows is the State of Wisconsin, which has over 30 water ski clubs all over the State. You should have contacted me in 1998 because that was the year I spent an entire month traveling up and down Wisconsin attending shows and filming over 30 different shows from different clubs.

Sadly the time when I was recording numerous shows was well before they invented HD cameras, so my footage was only Hi-8 and DV qualiy, but not HD quality.

After 2002 I lost interest attending these events, because as the years went by the costumes became less and less like real clothing, and degenerated into more and more use of spandex jumpsuits. But I wish I had an HD camera in 1977 when Seaworld used to have their Superheroes show .... cos all we have from that era are blurry Super8 films.

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