|
as much as the consummer/producer relationship is beneficial to both parties, there will always be conflicts of interest. just as consumers would grab all content for free if they could, producers would have no hesitation in charging 500$ for a membership if that would make them more profitable. in the end it's about finding a balance where both parties are satisfied. for a big site like twisty's that price may be lower than for a smaller site that does less volume.
same applies for videos. certain sites will be able to build a business model which will be profitable with downloads. others will struggle to do the same.
as far as review scores go, an analogy of a spectrum is appropriate. on one end of it, you have the perfect score which tells the surfer that he is getting extremely good value for his purchase. on the other end, the value is mostly for the producer- a shitty site that has nothing but feeds that costs 40$ a pop. just as a lower price will move the paysite along this spectrum towards a higher score and value for a surfer, so will downloadable videos. a lower score for not having downloads isn't a penalty. its simply a subjective and nominal indication of the value of the purchase, which review sites didnt just pull out of their asses. this IS what the surfers want and it's only fair to them that we use it in our rating criteria.
as a reviewer we have to be consistent when ranking sites along this spectrum. Robbie, you may not be able to continue providing downloads, but the surfer who wants them doesn't really care about the reasons why and he will be perplexed if all things being equal, your site, which only provides streaming vids, gets the same score as one that also allows downloads. yet another surfer, who doesn't care about downloads but wants to see your hot wife, will join regardless of the score.
no review site is reviewing paysites against their will. yes, streaming only sites would get more sales if we didnt take downloads into consideration. but so would sites with shitty content if we didnt rate that either. in the end, many sales are better than a few, but a few are still better than none.
|