Thank, MaxandStar!

Just my inner Shecky Greene (inside joke at an ad agency I worked for).

Such as the room we use? Obviously not in our home, but otherwise.

We have a 10 metre x 10 metre room with a drain in the floor for mess.
It is set up so the whole room can just be hosed down, with all our lighting hung from the roof beams for safety (Health and Safety is one of our top priorities). It is a big plain room and we have lots of different sets that we use and are continuing to create, that can be taken down and put into our storage areas.

It is all very hard work and we have a very good team, we operate with 15-20 people on PAYE (payroll).
Four of us are full time staff, Lisa, Charlotte, Al and myself, the rest are the actresses and actors.
A Book Keeper and an Accountant. (International sales are complicated)
We have to have specialist insurance due to the nature of what we shoot.
We have rent, rates, VAT (sales tax).
Gas, Electric, Phone and Internet.
We have two boilers, one for heating one for hot water.
Fire Alarm, Burglar Alarm, Fire Extinguishers, CCTV.
Two massive Wet Vacs.
We have several good quality 4K camcorders.
A massive wardrobe/changing room.
We also have lots of props and messy equipment.
Then there's all the messy substances, which require storage, mixing or decanting.
We have changeover days, where all the sets are taken down and swapped and all are cleaned.

I am always getting ideas, but the reality of new sets or building new equipment is always a lot more involved than it seems in my head.

You would be amazed at what goes into what we do.
You can't rest, you always have to come up with new content and new ideas.

Even with all of the above, we all get paid and the business is in profit, it's hard work, but ultimately the best job in the world.

I have no idea when we will have to start shooting VR media, or where or how we'd host it, but, if the time comes, we will find a way.

I always thought it would be cool to buy a villa somewhere hot like the Canary Islands, build a WAM room in the basement and rent it out. Retirement Plan?

Much of this sounds very familiar. It all represents a lot of work and a lot of overhead expense. Made the right call on 3D but VR is going to happen at some time in some form. Interesting to see others having similar issues.

Someone made wise long term investments with The WAMguard Group.

Wow, I knew the Moomin setup was impressive having been there for MoominSplosh2018, but even so hadn't realised the full business background.

To give a slightly cheaper option, back in 2004, with no real thought of wam production, I rented a Victorian back to back brick terrace house. Which just happened to have a full size basement beneath the ground floor with 6'6 headroom, a washable concrete floor, and mains drainage in the far corner beyond the outside door. This is actually a relatively common arrangement in a Northern UK city. Turning that space into a WAM facility was relatively straightforward, we used self-cutting washing machine valves to tap into the hot and cold water pipes to create our hosedown system, painted the back wall and made a moveable side wall for the shooting area, installed 4 x 500 watt tungsten halogen work lights as studio lighting, a couple of 2kw electric fan heaters to keep the girls warm when they're covered in wet mess, and off we went.

Business wise, what we take each month in sales is generally enough to cover the gunge material costs plus model fees for a weekend of shooting with two or three girls, but there isn't any actual profit - everything gets reinvested in shooting new scenes. It's worth it though, I've been able to work with some fantastic models down the years, and it's an amazing amount of fun to do.

You deserve to make a profit, the stuff you do is very original. Love the jumpsuits and the whole gothic vibe on your main site.

Alas, life is not about what's fair, or who deserves what.

Leon, your response is proof positive that it can be done, with a huge investment of time, money, and effort. But then again, you are a legend on here, along with MG and several others.

Thanks for that

And it only took us 15 years

Leon and Lisa had the insight, the skills and "the vision thing" to pull this off.
I salute them!

This is what my space looks like after a day of shooting.

Wow, what a great set you have, very impressive. One thing we lack at our warehouse at messyworld is natural light, so we are well jealous of those big windows.

Hate to say it it's not because of talent. It's because the producers are getting more greedy with how much it should go for $17.99 for the food and substance it's only about $25 and they sell a couple dozen of that one scene and boom they got a few hundred paid for the next few scenes and for some money in their pocket. Then they don't even take suggestions from the customer but instead feel like their suggestions matter. It doesn't matter how good the models look or perform if the scene doesn't match what the customer wants.

And there's where the greedy lazy women want more than 500 go fuck yourself. It's always been the same work and always will be and doesn't get harder. Us customers only have upwards of 100 bucks to spend and for it to go toward greedy models who ain't really interested.

It's called get yourself a significant partner who would love to perform wam with you and your the star and so is she. Costs helluva lot less and will have a much funner of a time.

And that's how you lose business

$25 for substances and selling dozens of copies? Sorry, but that's fantasy. I have a very few scenes that have sold several dozen copies, but many more that have sold less than 10 copies each. To shoot one single girl scene costs at least £100, once you've paid model fees, costs of substances, fuel to pick the model up and drop them off again afterwards, food and drink during the shoot plus taking them for a meal afterwards. And that's allowing for the model doing three scenes in the same day so the costs are split over the 3 scenes. You get some economies of scale when you do two-girl scenes, so those are probably £150 to £180 each to shoot.

The scene (lets assume 2-girl here) goes on sale for $15. Of which UMD takes $4.50 (which given the level of service and facilities provides is very fair) so the producer gets $10.50. $10.50 is £7.96 at current exchange rates (and that doesn't allow for the bank fees that reduce what you actually get). So even assuming minimum cost of £150 to make, just to break even that scene has to sell at least 20 copies, never mind making any kind of profit. And none of that allows for the fixed costs - cameras, lights, heating, hard drives, rent on studio space, etc. And that's my costs based on mainly shooting with non-pro models who do it for fun, and the occasional pro who works with me for way less than she'd get paid in her normal modelling because she enjoys the chance to let her hair down and go wild with mess. If I wanted to hire the kind of professional models that some of the US producers work with I'd be looking at paying about £3-500 per scene in fees, and no hope at all of recovering the costs.

I'm assuming you're talking about iwam? I can't speak for them but I'll share some info on how things work for us as we don't usually share of-screen information.

We have around 3000 regular members on our main website, not constantly there but who tend to dip in and out of membership periodically throughout the year, I have honestly no idea if that's good, average or behind within the market here, we have no way to compare. My guess is it is about average for a members site? who knows, but I'd imagine significantly behind some other, broader content outlets, such as UMD and sites that cater for multiple fetishes/audiences. But then, tbh, we don't care about all that as long as it is working and profiting. We do what we do for our specific members and that's it, no interest in trying to be bigger or better or tap into new markets here. And, for all the tongue in cheek moaning, we have a right laugh and have made some amazing lifelong friends doing this. If you have ever been on our site or seen our posts, we don't take ourselves seriously at all.

It's an extra source of income, and creates some great stories to tell. Like the postman who can no longer make eye contact with us because Lisa walked out into reception in her gunged underwear.

Messyworld is a very small part of what we do but it brings in an additional £29,000-£33,000 net profit for our company (based on the last 3 financial years). Not exactly huge amounts of money in the grand scheme of things, and would normally be axed in favour of better revenues in a heartbeat in business terms.

However, when put in perspective, good for only small stints of production. We film 3 times per year on average, mass producing content, usually over around 3 days from our warehouse which is a multi-purpose studio facility but contains a dedicated messy filming unit consisting of 4 varying sized studios, showers, a kitchen, dressing rooms, gunge preparation area, storage rooms, editing suites, offices, separate reception area (used just for the messy part) and an 5th currently unused studio on the second floor. Each shooting session (the 3 days stints) have a budget of about £5,000 which usually results in around 12 scenes.

Messyworld is entirely self-funded meaning it does not infringe on any of our vanilla businesses (I say vanilla, even though we don't consider Messyworld in any way an adult website). What I mean by self-funding is, funded solely off the membership takings alone. That includes shooting, equipment, web network hosting and content delivery services. Some members are consistent and have been there for years, the majority dip in and out throughout the year.

The most interesting thing is that 95% of our traffic comes from outside the UMD. We have a very, very low profile here, very little posts throughout the year, we don't advertise each update on the forums and we generally have very little interaction here. Yet, there has never been a time since 2012 when we haven't been in profit, and I am talking about Messyworld alone here, forget any wider incomes. There's no conclusion to this, but that's the facts for what it's worth.

We made a video called 'Meet The Dragonesses' a few years ago, which was a charity video which humorously name dropped a number of websites with messy content. I confess, I am not in any way brushed up on my knowledge of the market and no doubt we missed some of the biggest names, it was simply a case of googling "messy websites" and trying to go through lists and pick names at random that fit the script. It was the first time we had ever actually researched the 'messy' industry. I had never even clicked on another messy website before that date, Bad I know, but then I am not a consumer of messy content myself (doesn't mean I dont enjoy it).

Only a quarter of people who responded to that video understood the joke. Which shows there is a much wider market outside of the UMD as well as the market inside. However, I think that market is more for slapstick entertainment and not messy porn.

I don't know what this says or means. We should really do more market research, but we simply don't have the time.

Hope this info is insightful.

Wait...what!? Who exactly is getting greedy producer wise?
Is it the Moomins, who pump out the most content and therefore can afford to sell things at bulk prices?
Is it WAMTEC who is basically retired and selling content between 10-30 years old for cheap?
Is it self producers like Ariel and Jayce, who do this along side of being full time moms?
Is it the amateurs who appear for a couple months and then go out of business?

I don't know who exactly is being greedy here? There have been plenty of threads laying out the costs of what these people do. Pretty much accounting for every expense down to the penny. They've shown their work, and pretty much everything else except for a screenshot of their actual bank statement.


This is what customs are for. This is why there are such a variety of producers. And each of them has their own metrics of what has sold for them and what hasn't. A producer that wants to be "profitable" as in like (feed the family, get gas, and maybe be able to save up for a life event) has to make what will sell.

This in no way however stops you from ordering a custom to your specific liking. However, if even then you can't get it to your exact specs, then you can always...well...make your own! I mean, this is what I'm trying to do!

It's always fun to read what some people think about the finances of the business. Like virtually any operation it's difficult to have any real knowledge of something you aren't intimately involved with. Anyone with eyes can see where virtually all profit has gone at MPV since 1998.

Contrast the photos below for the difference in 1st efforts and the last couple years -

The profitability of pie videos is very low or even a loss. At ValentineNetwork.com I can only include WAM if it's possible to work it into another category at the same time such as a Lesbian Domination series or Femdom series.

I have had custom requests such as: 2 actresses, in costumes and dozens of pies... and the custom video fee would be quoted at at least $2500 IN ADVANCE... because when ever you see a super pretty pornstar on Valentine Network your seeing an adult actress that costs about $1000 per day to book... Plus Makeup artist, assistant and supplies. That doesn't even include production cost or wardrobe.

One of my actresses, Charlotte Stokely, just won both XBIZ and AVN 2019 All Girl Performer of the year... but the WAM community does not buy more copies of a video based on that. I did not see an overwhelming response to "Jessa's Sadistic Theater" from the WAM community which featured Charlotte and the beautiful Jessa Rhodes.... therefore, it has made me put WAM on the lowest priority list. So I guess this answers the question of which way the future is WAM is going.

I do have some older PG rated pie videos that had lower amateur actress salaries but even those aren't worth filming anymore because it wouldn't be able to sell to multiple categories of fetish customers. Also those still had costumes and set expenses.

I'm sure it is possible to get a young naive girl to do it for next to nothing but that's not the way I operate.

So I guess newcomers may be forced to adopt a "Girls Gone Wild" style or maybe you have a girlfriend that wants to make a few extra bucks filming it in a spare room with her pre-existing wardrobe.

Cam models may also want to get together with another cam model and see if they can make a few bucks. Again they'd be using pre existing wardrobe and no thought to sets or story line.