Mark, you know perfectly well that wasn't a "gift", it was payment for a custom video, which I specifically told everyone in the system when they signed up that I absolutely do not allow.

Tip and gift transactions are "cash equivalents" (same as a cash advance) in the credit card processing game and handling those is an entirely different business model. For one thing, they get charged MUCH higher fees, both for the merchant and for the cardholder. Second, you don't get to simply "decide" that you are going to process them. There are over 1000 merchant account categories and you are SEVERELY restricted to selling certain products/services in each category. If you have a merchant account categorized as "grocery", you do NOT get to sell shotguns or rent hotel rooms. You can lose your account and be blacklisted for life for selling "off-menu".

I've long suspected that C4S is large enough to operate as their own processing ISO, possibly with an offshore underwriting bank. They can probably issue multiple accounts with different classifications to their various subsidiaries. Since they charge 40% billing and have minimum per-minute pricing on videos, they have a lot of financial leeway to absorb some extra processing fees here and there. You simply don't get to measure the rest of us by what C4S does. It's apples to oranges.

I think that this would be hilarious! I love your term "puzzled investors". I think that would be the funniest part! Could you see the "Sharks" looking at each other, going, "WTF?"

But a parody of this would be great! The "demo" of what the producer would be doing, the confused looks between the sharks, the inane questions as the sharks try to figure out what the idea is and question how it would be profitable, WOW! And just like some producers on the real shows give the sharks some product to try to convince them, maybe the sharks all get pied, and then they "get" the idea and are all bidding to get it.

There. I just wrote a script for someone. Who's going to do it?

But seriously, I *do* like a combination of the crowd sourcing and the normal way. In other words, do an occasional crowd sourcing for a large, expensive project, but keep doing most production the usual way, to keep the volume of new material up.

Norman

This reminds me of a scene from the Cosby Show - insert Bill Cosby scumbag comment here - where Theo and his friend are trying to get into a taping of their favorite dance show. It turns out there's only room for one of them. They take turns saying "you go in" to the other a few times, until finally Theo's friend says "okay", leaving Theo there with a WTF?! look on his face.

You said name your own price, and folks took it literally. Then you grouse. Next time, don't make the offer if you don't want people to abide by it.

I don't think you read and understood his whole post.

I think the main reason for that was because of the number of scams and rip-offs that happened with single custom scenes. Bad enough where someone takes one person's money and then vanishes, imagine how much worse it would be if someone proposed a big multi-girl, mega-mess crowdfunded scene, raised a few thousand dollars from a couple of dozen sponsors, and then vanished into the distance.

The standard advice with customs is only ever pay 50% up front, the rest to follow on completion, but crowdfunding doesn't work that way, all the cash is up front and if the recipient then doesn't deliver, everyone who put money up gets shafted. MM didn't want to unleash that particular kraken on our community and I for one don't blame him.

It possibly could work if it was restricted to only those producers with very long (say at least seven years) track records, hundreds of scenes in their UMD store, and no history of failing to deliver - but it would still be a headache to oversee and manage.

Getting back to the Name Your Price thing, we won't be using it either. Our older scenes are $5 each. According to XE.com that currently amounts to Ł3.19. Just over three quid. To put that in perspective, a decent bottle of cider in a Yorkshire pub tends to cost about Ł3.60 - and usually more than that in the nice country pubs I take the girls to for a warm-back-up meal when we've finished a day's wetlook shooting in the Dales - even in high summer, our rivers are cold! So if someone isn't willing to pay the price of a single drink in a bar for a WAM scene, there really isn't any point making it any cheaper.

This weekend just past I was actually in Bristol shooting mud scenes, one of our people has moved down to a lovely little place in that part of the world and wanted to play in the famous local mud, so Friday and I drove down and we shot four scenes, two two-girl and two solos. Just the model fees came to over Ł300, and when I add on the fuel, both to get there and all the ferrying back and forth from locations to Daphne's place for clean-up between scenes - I still wonder what her neighbours in the village thought as the two girls came back each time, hair completely encased in river mud! - the huge Domino's meal I bought everyone when we'd finished, all the snacks and drinks and bottled water I bought for everyone during the day, the full cost of the weekend's work came to somewhere north of five hundred quid (or about eight hundred dollars).

To just cover the costs, each of those scenes has to sell at least $200 worth on the store, which is 14 sales at $15 per scene or 20 sales at $10. The final price will depend on length, how specialist the outfits were, and comedy value - the two girls had an absolute whale of a time pushing and pulling each other over, some of it was knockabout comedy gold!

But again, in perspective, $15 is just under Ł10. Or the price of three bottles of cider, or good bottled ale, in a British pub. Is the price of three drinks really too much to ask for decent length scenes of two pretty, totally up-for-it girls, genuinely having fun completely plastering each other in mud?

Crowd funding something towards tastes that are not just subjective but wildly varying...

Disaster waiting to happen.

Because someone would be demanding white socks?

And white jeans............!

Good points. I like to use the Starbucks coffee prices analagy myself. I can't even produce scenes in the USA for those very low prices for models that you quoted, cos in Florida I can't even get a model to get out of bed and show up for a shoot unless I offer each model a mininum of $500 per day (for non x rated scenes) or $800 per day for x rated scenes.

And how much does a gallon of petrol cost in the UK these days...more than most wam fans are willing to pay for some high quality wam entertainment. The problem is that WAM is a fetish, and it is not a "cult" that has a devoted following, like Apple has with the overpriced products they release that cause the Apple Zombies from around the world to stand in line for 3 days to pay $600 to $12,000 for their latest stupid invention, the iWatch.

MK

The problem with the name your price model is simple, you lose control of your product. Can you see Microsoft saying 'name your price' for their X box live subscription? Fact of it is simple, producer is the one who makes the product and puts it out. If the public don't want to buy it because it isn't good value for money, it is up to the producer to look at the facts and sort it out.

Does anyone remember the debacle of Gerald Ratner in his famous "because it's total crap!" comment about a product he was one of the main honchos for? All about how your product is perceived and controlled.

By stating such a thing any faith in the product went out of the window. Ask yourself this, if you need a pair of garden shears, one garden centre sold them for Ł14.99, another had ones that said 'name your price' are you likely to think "well they retail for Ł14.99 I better pay something like that."

Answer is no, people will think "If that's the game then 1p"

Ultimately, by setting such a badge as 'name your price' you, as a producer, are saying "I have no idea what the value of my product is." And customers will latch on to that and go "in that case neither do I!" and pay the lowest common denominator.

An earlier point talked about revenue only really going to the site owner due to the increased downloads. Even then, if they are going out for 10 cents, that's not a lot of cash.

Fact is that a good product is something people will pay good money for. After all, despite a Kia Optima having four doors and a lovely saloon style... It won't sell for the same Price as a BMW M5. Simple fact.

The difference is that all the things you name--garden shears, and um... a Kia Optima--cannot be pulled off the Internet for free. I suppose you can walk into a store and try to take them without paying, but even in 2015, we still call THAT stealing. (And you'd probably be caught... At least with the Kia...)

But if a couple scumbags share links on a shady forum, or email clips, or repost vids on private YouTube pages.... They typically get away with it.

"Name your price" is a way for Internet sellers to acknowledge that people COULD obtain their product (files) for free through some shady means, but they are offering a legit way to get the product... AND, hopefully, give some money back to the creator.

I'm not sure how much outright theft we have in this small community. Thankfully the upshot of an incredibly tiny market is the ability to effective patrol it. But that said, I've definitely seen my clips being traded for free online before. Doesn't mean I'm willing to let people have them for 10 cents, tho.

So, while this may get me in trouble, and I'm not sure precisely if it's linked, but your sale was advertised in 4chan threads G3. That may have contributed to the people taking content at bottom dollar.

Though it's also how I found out about the sale, and I certainly KNOW I did not pay that kind of peanuts.

I haven't read every post in the thread, so I know this may have already been said, but the overall issue with "name your price" is that the only way to come out on top is for people to be decent and pay a fair value based on what they think the product is worth, not 1% or 0% of the original asking price.

Trusting in a community to be decent and fair at all times unfortunately feels like a lot less reliable business model than it used to be, especially when dealing with the current generation on the internet.

I'm not sure what the overall answer to the problem is. =(

Killing the bold because I'm just nice guy and no one else wants to.

I kept trying to figure out how to do that. Derp.

Some producers decide to give away things for free. Our forums are chock full of freebies every day. Our Videos page is full of trailers and even full-length vids, put there by producers who thought it necessary for advertisement, or even just for fun. There is no chance or option for a person to buy those videos. They are free and that's it. But producers do participate there when they think it's worth it, and I pay the bandwidth to support their effort.

I have had a Video page "tip jar" on my backburner for over 2 years. If the vids are already there for free, and an appreciative visitor wants to throw you a couple of dollars, then why not give them the ability to? Well I started work on this tip jar a few months ago, and I realized the backend is exactly the same as Name Your Price: The producer puts up a vid that can be had for absolutely free, and the customer decides what to pay for it, if anything. The difference is only semantics. If you are a producer that has ever uploaded anything free, then Name Your Price / Tip Jar should almost be an upgrade because at least the user has a chance of volunteering money for it.

Name Your Price was never meant to be a replacement for, or challenge to, a traditional sales business model. It is just a tool that you can use (or not) right along with our other features like free trailer hosting, pic galleries, the sales module, bundles, and everything else. You can offer one video under NYP, or your whole catalog; for one day, a year, or not at all. I am not smart enough to be able to predict what the best long-term business models of the internet will be, so I build what I can, to give you guys the flexibility to do whatever you think is best for your particular biz. I would hope that you would consider using multiple ideas together, instead of pigeonholing the newest idea into the "won't work" camp before really considering how it might fit into anyone's overall business plan.

Plus, consider the models who are on the fence about commercialism anyway--like doing it just for fun. These are the people who might only want to maybe recoup some costs, and nothing else. They might like a tip jar, and they might see Name Your Price as the moral option for them, because it straddles the line between free and pay, and ultimately lets the user decide. UMD stores are for these models and producers, too, and I will pay the bandwidth to support them.

I will be coming up with a stats page in the coming weeks, but meanwhile I can tell you that personally it has worked great for my old iWam content. Sales have been up about 500% since I turned ALL of my content into Name Your Price. It's really old content, and this may not be the result you get. But isn't that the point of it being an option for some to try out? I won't comment yet on the results of other producers (hopefully they can express their own results and opinions).

What's more is that the novelty of Name Your Price spurs sales for other producers (and for your other stuff). It also brings in new UMD members, some of whom convert into long-term customers. Yes, the minimum checkout price is still $5, and yes, a customer can buy something from another producer for $5, and then in the same communal cart, get your stuff for $0, so you have made nothing on that sale. You might look at your stats and say WTF!? But what happens next time when you are the one who made the $5 and the other producer gave up the freebie. You cannot tell what else was in the customer's communal cart, for privacy reasons, and showing you guys how much you mutually help each other is one of the most difficult things of my job.

No individual producer minimum checkout amount will be offered. It is name your price, and I think the simplicity and honesty of it shouldn't be changed. The limits that we do have is that a customer can only buy up to 5 freebies in a cart. That, combined with the $5 minimum purchase, happens to prevent a user loading up on everything for free in one go. They can still buy everything for a really low price, just not for free. If you don't want them to get so many for free, then you can limit how many items you offer under NYP at a time, just like you limit how many trailers and freebies you give away. I am assuming most of the risk because even if it's free for the customer, I still have to pay the bandwidth for him to download it, plus I'm still paying for your hosting and storage, too (and doing the requisite customer service, etc etc).

The tip jar is still coming to the Videos page, since the backend is already built (same as NYP's backend). It'll basically be just be an "add to cart" button and small input field added underneath of the existing video, which lets the customer buy the vid that he's already seen, for the price that he's entered. It'll go into his cart just like a download. I'll name the button "tip jar" instead of "add to cart" but again it's an identical procedure--one which might have been a bit less controversial if I launched it first, even though it's the exact same thing.

Can I say once again, that producers who feel that they have to compete by offering bargain basement prices are mistaking. Every single day I see vids fly out of the store that are $10, $15, or $20 because people will buy what they want, even in the face of so much free content. If you are still trying to rely on market pricing controls on other producers to maintain your competitive advantage, then I recommend that you review your business model. Free stuff is going to be out there and always has been, and if your content is worth it and novel enough, your fans will pay for it.

Name Your Price is one of several advertising tools for you to use, and it's not meant to be this great money-making revolution on its own, so please adjust your expectations. I'm occasionally told that I'm not "making enough money" for the producers, so I continue to introduce tools for you to use, and knobs for you to turn. This one bridges the gap between free and pay, both concepts which almost all producers on this site already embrace. So to me, it made sense to give you this type of flexibility to offer to your customers.

I invite everyone to please read my original post from when I launched Name Your Price, because I did try to pre-empt some of these concerns there. https://umd.net/forums/name-your-price-is-now-open

I look for any ideas or feedback. Thanks for all the producers who are taking part!
Messmaster

I've always believed that NYP could have its place in the WAM business world, but that having a minimum purchase price (that can be altered) is a fair and reasonable way to price videos accordingly and I definitely prefer that. NYP, to me, seems like it can heavily devalue your content and considering what people invest into their own original work, it does seem like an insult. Folks like Meathook, who takes great pride in his WAMerica videos, puts a ton of hard work, time, and capital into his product. For some folks to only want free pics or sample clips seems frustrating considering he may have spent $XXX on just the model alone. Model fees (and also agency fees in some cases) are the single biggest filming expense!!!!!!!!!!

I recently set the minimum purchase amount far lower than it was back in December and sales have picked up. They aren't close to what they were 1 and 2 years ago, but I think this business has its cyclical stages like anything else. Then again, with such a tiny market/niche, how can one really predict what business will do in the next year? All I have to go by are previous year's sales broken down by each month. How big or small exactly is this "niche"? Like my mentality was in 2002, film what you like, the way you want it, and hopefully other guys will like what you have to offer.

Over the past 10-12 years, I've figured that the WAM market will continue to gain exposure and more awareness as more people get past age 18 and realize what a vast resource the internet is for obtaining specific fetish-oriented videos. While I agree with others' comments about all the free stuff obtainable from YouTube, here, etc, crowding an already overly saturated WAM market, there are folks out there willing to plunk down good money for specific messy videos found only on specific sites. $10-15 for one clip isn't too out of control for WAM clientele who are loyal and are seeking certain genres of WAM. I always thought pricing 2-3+ girl scenes higher than solo girl scenes was a great idea based on the extra investment involved with supplies and model fees. However, when re-releasing something older or a shorter clip, I go the cheaper price route. I would never do the C4S business model of charging $1 for every 5 seconds of footage NYP does seem like it could work better with releasing older back-catalog material that have already made their money back over time. I dunno, my opinion is very mixed on that because there's really no way of telling how sales will turn out. One month I'll have a great month, the next an OK month. But then December will end up being the best month I've ever had. Since March 2006, only two months out of all of them have netted less $$ from WAM than my real "day" job(s). Both of those months were in the same year. I have faith the market will continue to grow; there will always be consistent buyers out there, willing to spend their well deserved money on messy videos featuring certain models that appeal to them. A lot of guys seem to be loyal to certain sites/producers because of their 'style' and the types of models they recruit. It's all personal taste, and this market's tastes happen to be all over the spectrum.

Personally, I think if there ain't hotel curtains in the background it ain't WAM.

Hahahahahahaha!!!! Boom! ❤️

And as far as tv scenes go if there are goggles, helmets, protective clothing or dumbed down attire that indicate predictability and a lack of spontaneity thats not a valid WAM scene either.