Thought of asking via PM, but this is new info to me and I am curious as to other opinions as well as my question.

MG just had a post deleted advertising their WOTD sale because "you can only promote two sales per year, and this includes WOTD ones."

This seems...odd to me. Could MM or an Admin possibly chime in as to the reasoning behind this rule, because as a consumer (particularly following the likely lean year many of us had) I certainly hope the site would not do anything to actively discourage producers putting things on sale. While this rule technically doesn't do that, it appears to be a de facto limitation, as there is little point in holding a sale if you can't tell people about it.

I realize there's potential for abuse (holding a one day sale every week or something), but putting a flat number on it, and especially such a low number, seems, as we hipster doofuses like to say, capricious and arbitrary. Surely this could be addressed more on a case-by-case basis, a simple post history tells you how often a producer advertises such things, and if they are viewed as spamming the posts can be removed, but two per year? Really?

It is an arbitrary number, but I had to choose some number because otherwise some producers will run a sale like every month. I'm completely open to suggestions on what the max number should be.

Peace
Messmaster

I must say, monthly seems reasonable in my opinion?

Remember that we will be multiplying this by a lot of producers. That's a lot of sales.

I do get your concerns, in my mind it's that compromise that gets away from "omg it's only twice a year?!" and "oh for goodness sake they're doing this daily!"

Monthly in my mind personally is that happy balance. Remember of course that producers won't all have their sale posts at the same time so the posts will be spread out! But personally I'd form a compromise, "you can post a sale monthly BUT xxxxx" so maybe they have to ensure it's user oriented so has plenty of photos to add to the forums input quality as opposed to a simple "sale again, yey" type post?

As a producer I'm not sure once a month would be good for anyone as it would literally saturate the site with sales and if everyone he's having sales once a month Surely those buying them will be spoilt for choice and probably end up spending less money in the end
Let's not forget in the UK DFS has a sale literally all the time and the last thing that anyone does is rush to the store just because it has a sale poster up Every other week

Don't get me wrong I understand your point but as an end user ultimately what happens is we see far more posts of additional content getting pushed (assuming my other post stands where there must be pictures or something to add to the forum visually). The forum needs to visually show a range of images/content to draw in the populace in an effort to boost attendance.

Let us consider of course that a monthly sale is not a constant sale as per your dfs comparison. That said, I believe a compromise could be struck, for example, bi-monthly/quarterly sales?

Offering discounts doesn't drive down sales, over promoting does. As a user, I can personally suggest I'd be happy to see a monthly "here's what we're offering this month" (of course other opinions are welcome).

Given that most other sites such as patron you find that updates are monthly, this puts the umd into an area to compete against such sites.

What MM said. Bear in mind every producer is also allowed to plug every scene twice as well (once each for up to 2 different sites, so own site + umd store, or umd + vidown, or own site + vidown, and so on) - if you also allow monthly sales posts we'd all be sinking in promo posts (which is nothing like as much fun as sinking in mud). Also not every producer runs sales, and there are loads of people who'll never get WOTD. MM has to keep a balance between legitimate promotion, and so much promo it drowns out conversation. When a producer has a sale running then already get a little banner advertising it under their store avatar, so it's on every post they make, so people who follow their posts will easily be able to see there's a sale.

Added a poll for suggestion purposes.

I personally wouldn't mind monthly, just because

(1) the forum is already pretty heavy with producer-based content, and this would be consistent with that.

(2) this is a maximum, it isn't necessarily going to encourage producers to do sales every month, they would need to analyze their own sales figures and decide. Personally, I would guess a sale every month wouldn't be a great strategy, but hell if I know.

(3) while there's potential for more posts of this nature, (and I suppose this is quite subjective), I would be less likely to object to posts like this because of the nature of them - it's telling people of a chance to save money. Saving people money is (from a consumer standpoint) an objectively good thing, and I personally would feel like a bit of a killjoy if I made a post about how the stores on this site are running too many sales. Even if it's a bit spammy, it's more... positive anyway.

Just adding to that sorry, remember most people are paid monthly. Basic marketing is to attract customers when they are most likely to make a purchase, aligning a monthly sale with monthly income can't hurt sales.

I will be transparent, I'm paid weekly so it's more valid if someone paid monthly chips in here,

James

Is that an option they have to select? From the OP example, Messygirl's store avatar in their other post today has no such banner showing for me.

A very valid point but personally I'd never even noticed that? Has anyone else noticed this?

My point is if it isn't being noticed by the general populace of the forum (the money spenders) then is it really a process that's working adequately for the purpose of a sale?

Monthly pay is the normal in the UK but not everywhere. I gather in the US many people are paid twice a month, 1st and 15th (ish).

Personally I'm not a fan of sales at all, I feel its insulting to the loyal fans who paid full price if you then halve it in a sale. Shops selling physical merchandise have sales to clear out unsold stock to make space for new products, but digital stores don't have that need to clear stock, so it seems a bit pointless. When prices are lowered it just means fewer new scenes can be shot as revenues will drop. Better to offer deals like buy-2-get-1-free - Mostwam and a few others I follow do that, and it does mean most of the time I buy three of their scenes at a time instead of one at a time.

*I worded that a bit too strongly*

While I agree with the premise, buy 2 get 1 free is a sale to me? So maybe that's where this issue gets a little more convoluted?

To both points - yes bi-weekly is more common in US, monthly is relatively rare.

And yes, buy 2 get 1 is a sale, the merit of X% off sales versus bulk buy sales is a different issue that is not without merit but wasn't the intention of this post. I personally try to save my money and make bulk purchases from the producers that offer discounts, so for me the type of sale is irrelevant, I view a "buy 2 get 1" as 33% off, I just need X amount of scenes that I deem worth buying.

Id also like to suggest a way to communicate sales to a group of followers. Say i could send a message to all the followers of my store or all the followers of a particular model within my store. This would also help reduce some of the sale overload in the forums. But right now (to my limited knowledge) the forums are the only place we can inform our fans unless they log into their favorite store every day to see if there is a sale going on.

Is that something that could be implemented MM?

If the producer wants, those BuyX campaigns can sort of be permanent features of their stores. But a sale should really be special, not another excuse to plug in the forum as often as the rules will allow, as you know some producers will do. And for how long each? Two weeks? That means everything is on sale half the time. I don't want it to turn into a disingenuous gimmick as most sales are.

Absolutely! So if the buyX sales are a normal feature then I would probably agree monthly is too much to be honest!

However, I would still suggest that twice yearly is too little in my opinion... I would suggest 4-6 times a year and as you suggest, control the length accordingly

Also consider that there are probably only 50 or less producers that REGULARLY promote scenes. There are a hundred times more stores than what promote in the Messy forum.

Also some producers (top ten or so) plug two or more scenes in a single day at times.

I'd say over 75% of of the Messy and Wetlook forums are just sales posts anymore.

If steps like this weren't taken it would just be a spamfest.

The question for yourself here would be - what do you come to the forum for?

As much as I agree that some producers may go mad (others not so, of course), most people come here for the messy content. It must be adequately controlled of course but I'm not sure that reducing sales to 2/year does that...

(Can I just add, I'm appreciating this debate, everyone is being very constructive about it!)

BTW thanks for the poll The issue with the "No set number" option is that each time, it will require moderators to check all the past sales posts, review the history, and make a subjective decision (based on what?). That's overhead that we don't have. Also, that would eliminate the decisive guideline for producers to try to stick to, and the appearance of unevenly moderated sales posts will cause a constant stream of complaints straight in my inbox--trust me.

I would err towards your experience on that point for sure, I guess my notion with that is can it fall under the general spam rules? I agree admins shouldn't be running history for every sales post, but unless a sales post was reported as spam (I don't know if that's what happened with the MG post), it wouldn't require a review. I imagine the users would notice if a particular producer was doing disingenuous sales (10% off for one day every week) that were obviously cover to just plug their store. The users would then report it as spam and an appropriate review could be done.

To Potato's point, I agree spamfest is not great, I guess I would (in vacuum) rather have posts promoting sales than posts promoting new scenes, because the later is easier to find on one's own. Sort downloads by newest and you can view all the newest scenes, but AFAIK there is no way to find which stores are running sales except sorting through the pages of every store and looking for them.

Not read everything so apologies if I'm repeating someone:

Could we have a sales group list where producers could advertise sales, say once a month and advertise new material on the messy/wetlook forums?

This would allow sales to be separate and accessible for those that want them while keeping them off the forums so not to spam them?

Not sure if this solves anything, soz, bit spinny from clients today. Maybe thinking isn't the best plan right now.

Maybe have a special forum for sales? Those who don't want don't have to follow that forum?

When a store has buy-2-get-1-free it tends to be permanent, so you always know you have the choice of paying X for one scene or X x2 for three of them, and it's up to you if they have enough you like the style if, to use the bulk buy discount. Whereas if someone is selling a scene for X, and people buy it, and then the producer has a 50% sale, it's like saying to all the original buyers "Ha ha you schmucks, I made you pay X for a scene that's really only worth half that, fooled you!"

Perhaps I'm just weird in how I look at things, but that's how it comes over to me. And an inevitable side effect is going to be that no-one buys anything till you next have a sale, which, if you've priced your scenes to cover costs and small profit at normal price, means you're now losing money.

I was thinking something along those lines as well - some additional parameters that I would consider in that idea (not sure from a technical side how difficult these would be, but just throwing them out there in a non-messy way as food for thought)

-No replies allowed - only producers can post the sale and the details associated with it

-Have the sale posts disappear when the sale expires (therefore only active sales are shown)

-Make the sale content filterable by type (wet,messy,male,female,etc.) so that users can only see the sale content they want to see

-Have the sale start dates/end dates be sortable and visible so we can see which ones are expiring soon

-Each producer can only have one active sale post at a time so as to minimize flooding

As the devil's favourite advocate I just wanted to jump in with a few points on this.

1. With the collapse of the likes of ECGunge and Splosh forums and WAM based FetLife Communities practically dead the UMD is now pretty much the only home for the WAM community. Given that monopolistic position it would fatally undermine the WAM community to shift from trying to cater to as much of the community as a whole to just satisfying a simple majority and letting the rest swivel.

2. To what extent is most people being "here for the messy content," a self fulfilling prophecy? If discussion points are regularly buried under a mountain of commercial posts within a few hours to what extent might that supress discussions and put off people primarily looking to talk or connect with others?

3. Given the frequency at which the topic of how the UMD caters to female users comes up I don't think it would be out of line to suggest that if 80% of the posts in the main messy discussion forum are of people selling content that it might potentially intimidate some potential new female users coming to the site?

On these points I don't think permitting more posts on sales in the main forums will help any of them.


It is also worth keeping in mind that it is a limit on promoting sales and not sales themselves. Correct me if I'm wrong but my reading of this is that there is nothing to stop a producer say having a different limited edition bundle for sale every first weekend of the month so long as they only post a maximum of two times about all their sales in the messy forum each year. However fans of that particular store would know about it and presumably go each month to the store to see what's in the special bundle each month. That and it'd appear in latest bundles on the scenes page.


I reckon this is probably the best compromise solution, the creation of a Bargain Hunter group that people could subscribe to for news of sales or failing that could people instead receive an alert/notification whenever a store they're following posts a new sale and make the whole thing personalised based on the stores people follow (apologies if following a store already does this).

Indeed perhaps the following of store option may be a way of re-balancing the commercial posts to discussion posts in the main forum. By either following a store or the user account associated with a non-UMD hosted website/store you are able to see all posts they make tagged as commercial in a month as well as receive notifications of sales and/or exclusive promo codes whilst the store/user account associated with a store gets to make one commercial post a fortnight or month that is visible to everyone including non-followers. The exact details and frequency at which producers can make commercial posts to all users can be tweaked to ensure balance between users being able to meaningfully customise their experience, owners being able to appeal to new followers/customers and try not have a too commercial post heavy experience for newcomers to the forum.

When Tara and I made our videos, we tended to have buy 2 get one free deals etc once the initial sales had dropped to almost nothing.

You are paying full price at the start for instant access to the new material. If you are willing to wait 6 months, then yes... you may well get it in a sale.

I like the idea of a 'sales' forum or similar. Or maybe limit how many items can be sold per month in a sale?

Hurry, only 7 copies left!!! Kinda thing

Life's too short to worry about this stuff

I don't have anything productive to say, but wanted to mention that everyone is being so constructive and nice and it's just great to see.

I feel the same. At Vidown, we have a cumulative discount - the more items you buy on the same transaction, the deeper your discount. It's opt-in but most vendors use it. We also have a standard flat rate sale system (30% off! 50% off!, etc) but I'm not a fan. I only included it because some vendors like to do it occasionally. Those occasions can include traditional holidays, season changes, or just an unexpected expense where they need some extra income in a hurry.

Running a sale monthly just shows that the site operator doesn't have a strong understanding of how to run a business. If there's a consistent sale every month, then it doesn't take long before no regular customers will buy anything at any other time. Why should they? It would be a predictable and avoidable waste of money. The sale price ceases to be a sale price at that point and becomes the standard price for everyone except a few unsuspecting noobs who wander in during a non-sale week, and they will also figure it out after a couple of months.