MudMadPhil said: Rob Blaine used to sell his video's for $60 each back in the early days.

Potatoman-J said:
To be honest, I love your stuff, and have bought a bunch. I never even noticed the increase. I think it's far less that and far more the last sentence. The global economy is dogshit, the US (most likely) blew up two of Europe's gas pipelines. So, people are worrying more about not freezing to death this winter and keeping a roof of their head.

DungeonMasterOne said:
True, I still have the tapes I bought from him in the 90s, when even though it was more than $1.50 to the pound, the $60 was £50 once you factored in the (horrendous) bank fees, and shipping costs.

But for that $60 you got a two hour tape with six separate scenes on it, most of which had multiple models in. So it was effectively $10 a scene.

For younger readers who won't remmber that era, when you bought a Messy Fun VHS cassette you got six scenes, all of which would start out fully clothed, and stay that way for roughly 2/3 of the scene, then the girls would strip, and the final section was full nude. Rob once told me in email that he'd worked out the audience was 60% clothed wam, 10% messy stripping, and 30% naked wam, so that's how he ran his scenes.

There would be a mix of mud, food messy (gunge wasn't a thing), and usually at least one pure wetlook. Some of the messy scenes would include a wash-off section at the end too.

So, 1995, you got six scenes for $10 each. The difference was that the models looked and dressed like they'd walked off the cover of Vogue, and they also got paid way more - $250 a scene each, and one popular model did over 40 scenes, earning $10,000 in the process. And the other difference is that Rob knew each tape would sell hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of copies.

Ok, up to the present. The going pay rate for WAM in the UK is between £30 and £60 per model per scene. In our case we also cover all transport expenses, put visiting models up for free, provide comprehensive snacks and drinks for everyone during the shoots and a good evening meal each day afterwards. Plus we provide all the outfits, footwear, underwear. etc - basically a model comes for a weekend, provides nothing but herself, lives here for free, and can take home £400 depending on how many shoots we do. For many that's a month's rent, or a month's energy bills paid, just for having fun getting messy, so it's worth their time.

Then there is the cost of the gloop. Gunge is £5 a bucket. 2kg cartons of custard are £1.30 to £1.50 each, and it takes 12 of them to fully cover, shampoo, and face-cover, one fully dressed model. Generally speaking, any one shoot will use between £30 and £50 worth of materials, some will use more.

And then there are the fixed costs. Our dungeon has 1.2kW of halogen light and 4kW of electric heat. Then there's the natural gas comsumption of the boiler for all the hot water needed. And while moving to LED lamps would cut the lighting bill, we'd just have to run extra heaters to make up for the loss of the heat from the halogens, so there isn't actually any saving there. And after a scene the girls like to stand directly in front of the lamps to heat up again.

Those scenes then go on sale for $15 each, with a buy-2-get-1-free so if someone buys 3 they effectively pay $10 each. Of that $10, I get $7, MM gets $3. Which is a fair rate in this business, C4S for example takes $4 of every $10. Current exchange rate is $1.20 to £1 so that $7 is worth £5.80, and you then need to subtract conversion and bank fees, so effectively £5.

So, in total, a 2 girl scene probably actually costs not far off £200 to shoot once all costs have been taken into account. And each sale nets £5, so to cover the costs, each scene needs to sell 40 copies to break even.

I have over 600 scenes in my download store. Exactly 39 of them have sold 40 copies or more. Only two have sold over 100, one's at 105, and our best seller is at 107.

There's a good reason the only people who really stay the course in this business are those doing it for the love of WAM, and why each producer tends to shoot their own passion and taste rather than trying to "chase the market". If I'd taken all the money I've spent over the last seventeen years on WAM shoots and instead invested it in the stock market, I'd have made way, way more money. But I wouldn't know all the amazing people I've met in this game, both models and fellow producers. And I'd have had way less fun. So overall I think it was and is worth it. But you can see why so many who arrive here thinking they're going to make a fortune soon give up and leave.

Would putting prices up make things better? Almost certainly not, it'd just result in fewer, or no, sales. In a competitive market you can differentiate yourself on quality, but only so far. And in a digital market any attempt to ramp up prices is almost certainly just going to result in more piracy. Were that not a factor then hiring top notch models costing £££ or even ££££ per shoot, and pricing the resulting scenes at $150 each, would at least be possible. But in this market, all that would happen is groups of friends would club together to buy one copy and then share it between themselves, and one of them would probably end up putting it on a pirate site. And no, DRM isn't the answer, that just puts people off even more and/or drives them to pirate sites and unlocked versions.

So in answer to the original question, yes, we probably are all underpaying for WAM videos, but the market reality is that's unlikely to change any time soon.

And one of these days I really do need to create my long-planned "So you want to be a WAM producer" blog!

DungeonMasterOne said:
True, I still have the tapes I bought from him in the 90s, when even though it was more than $1.50 to the pound, the $60 was £50 once you factored in the (horrendous) bank fees, and shipping costs.

But for that $60 you got a two hour tape with six separate scenes on it, most of which had multiple models in. So it was effectively $10 a scene.

Jayce said: Hey! I'm starting with LinkedIn and then? I will be doing a YouTube channel where we bring on producers, consumers, wammers all different types of people from the umd and beyond to phone or Skype interview!

Jayce said: You could totally bring your blog to the table! I would LOVE to have someone as tactical as you are to be on my team with your big words and nice paragraphs and stuff. Hahahahhaa "good words sound good" hahah
Yes I'm from kentucky. Yes we wear shoes. Sometimes.

Gunge_is_great said: I am still new to making and selling videos so i price mine low due to not having a lot of experience in making content

dlodoski said:
Hmmmm Not if you were only interested in mud, or wetlook, or mess. Then it was $30 per scene. That's how it was for me. (I bought the tapes anyways).

DungeonMasterOne said:

To be honest price should reflect quality, not experience, if you're producing decent quality material, charge decent prices for it, for starters under-pricing can lead to people assuming something's not very good, just because it's cheap. Look at your stuff objectively, camera angles, can we see what's happening properly, is it decently lit, etc, and price from there.

quarryman said: Long read ahead warning, long attention span required, you've been warned!...

To answer the original question, the answer is, of course, yes and no. By way of introduction, I am the original mud video producer in the US and am the one that got Rob Blaine started in business. Perhaps my perspective might be of interest?...

I laugh at the concept of making money at $1 per running minute yet one can indeed make money at $1 a minute, however, I would not be able to do so these days as at that rate I would have to have a larger customer base than would be possible for the type of material I would produce. I would have to produce more "mainstream" content to make money at that level and that type of content would not be of interest to me to produce...

I produced a series of nine two-hour VHS tapes back in the 80's that sold for $50 and had a growing customer base of nearly a hundred when I walked away from it all and tried unsuccessfully to pass the distribution side of the things to what became Messy Fun. Let's see, that's $.50 a minute but with inflation that would surely be at least $4 a minute now...

Ah but there's a catch, I never made a penny! All I did is manage to not lose any significant amount of money. All my money was spent on production costs, that is, cameras and the odd model willing to work cheap. Video cameras were new back then and much more expensive and temperamental to maintain than now and the conditions at the outdoor mudpits I filmed at destroyed three cameras at an average of a camera every two years...

Let's talk economics a little, it is more complicated than it appears. Think of it as a ritzy department store versus WallyWorld, in other words, supply and demand rules but there are market tiers, that is, smaller markets that can sustain high cost quality products and larger markets where costs must be as low as possible. So, I would assert that the same applies to WAM video, however, the trick is that if you want to play in an upper end market, you must offer something very different from the bottom end side of things and that something will vary from time to time due to the Red Queen Effect. Which is to say, you must constantly innovate to stay even in the market...

Let's mention two elephants in the room. The first is sex, the real deal sex under the law and not dildos, lesbo stuff, and rubbing here and there and the fact that relatively few producers are willing to produce that type of material because of the legal intricacies involved. There is a large mainstream porn industry out there but note that there are very few WAM producers that are producing that type of material...

Without going into numerous side issues related to all that, my point is that WAM as we know it is somewhat of a specialty niche whose central defining characteristic is really nary so much the WAM aspect as instead the demographic customer base upon which it is built. And that base is the subset of the general population that is willing to look, not do, and that in many cases is really more interested in seeing a substance on or a person in a substance than seeing a male/female or male/male couple getting it on in a substance...

The net effect of this is that this limits the size of the pie and as has been mentioned oh so many times before, there are so many competing for an slice of the pie that it has driven prices down, way down. And, with the drastically decreasing cost and ubiquity of everyone having a small iThingy video studio in their hand, it is now a game everyone can play and there are a lot of folks out there that are willing to tolerate low quality shaky camera work. Welcome to modern times...

What really surprises me however is the lack of attention on this tread to be biggest elephant in the room, piracy. I had several reasons for getting out of distributing my videos, however, the biggest element was arrival of the digital age and the obsolescence of my copy protection scheme as it meant that shortly I would no longer be able to recover my production costs even though I was growing my customer base. The problem there was that my customer base was growing linearly whereas the piracy leakage was growing exponentially...