Quote:
Originally Posted by justinsain
Serious question as I'm genuinely interested. 
Did you shoot on your own and then sell sets to magazines or were you a staff shooter? |
Always been a self employed shooter. Employed staff when I was selling via mail order in the UK. Damian has posted I employed staff in the UK. When we were here in Czech we employed 8 staff. That was clearly posted and ignored in Squealers post.
Quote:
|
Did the magazines set the usage rights?
|
It was joint negotiations. Usually the only thing the magazines were interested in was First or Second rights in the country they were publishing from.
Quote:
|
Could you sell a set to Club and then sell the exact same set to Barely Legal?
|
That was the entire idea of shooting content. A very good set, like ones of the girls these trolls are flaming, Could sell First rights UK ($1,000), US $1800-$2400), in EU countries (prices ranged form $300 to $1,000, Japan, Australia, then to phone adverts, then on the Internet and now in phones. Then we gave content to Photorama who sold it to the world. With some restrictions. Earning $5,000 from a good solo girl set isn't unusual. Some of the guys at the top of the tree would earn $10,000 from a single set.
Quote:
|
It truly is a great deal to retain your rights to the images you've sold with which you can then resell over and over. I thought magazines would have bought the sets exclusively to keep their competitors from getting the same material.
|
They sometimes did, but they knew the value of good content and knew it cost money. Why buy an edition of Club or Knave that month? The content inside.
Quote:
|
If Club buys the set first and then Barely Legal gets it, Club is mad because their content has been diluted and Barely Legal would be mad because their subscribers may have already seen the images ( used content ).
|
No because by the time Club published it in the UK, Barely Legal might be only having it on the shelf ready to publish. Also they were different countries. Club UK, Barely Legal US. The idea of exclusive one off sales started with online porn and mainly because of the fortune Zmasters made with their discs of content and the fools who bought it because it was cheap. The idea of saturating a set inside a mainstream members are slim and to do so the sales to the creator are immense. The exclusive content was born out of the saturation on TGP sites, a mod on a TGP was seeing the same content over and over again from too many affiliates submitting.
for shooters it's about how much WE make. Not how happy your affiliates are. Nice to keep them happy, but not at our financial cost.
Also a few could produce better content by going exclusive. Most produced worse.
Quote:
|
When I submitted my work to mainstream magazines I was often warned by photo editors not to submit the same thing to competing magazines. They wouldn't even accept duplicate slides because of this. Their reasoning made sense to me and I didn't have a choice anyway because they set the rules.
|
If you were submitting the same set to different magazines in the same countries, then you had a problem. submitting to a Club UK, Barely Legal US, Seventeen in Holland, wasn't a problem and we knew it. So shot each set with duplicate frames, which we sorted out on the light box. This was in the days of transparencies.
Quote:
|
I can see how the magazines you sold to back then would let let you keep the rights for anything but selling to competing magazines because back then the internet wasn't even a thought so they weren't worried about it. Seems like shooters today would be stuck selling exclusive due to the easy proliferation.
|
Yes, today with the decline of all other markets shooters have little options. The online porn guys have reduced the market to to what it is. However up until we had our set backs, there was still more money in not selling exclusive.
Take these sets as an example. Each one of these sets or sets and videos have sold around 100 times from the stores. Then add magazines and DVD sales, we actually did an exchange deal with Scala for 6 scenes for one of ours. So we got 6 of their scenes to sell online for one of ours for them to sell on DVD. Also did a similar deal with a US company. Do the maths. As I said, I pay my bills with my income, not yours or your affiliates.
And that was always the situation. Custom paid very badly and I have never seen a regular off line magazine shooter shooting for online custom. Never seen an online company selling to magazines and only recently did I see online porn selling to the DVD part of the industry.
This was an enormous failing on their part. The profit that could of been earned was there ready to be taken. It could of been another arm of an existing business, it could of been a completely new stream of income. It could of meant for custom shooter giving up shooting scenes exclusive for $300 and shooting non exclusive for $3,000
Damian posted how little I understood the Internet and online marketing. Well most of online marketing doesn't pay affiliates 50%+ and supply them every single tool they need and give the product away in quantities that reduce sales.
The Internet is merely the vehicle we use that delivers the porn, clueless about printing. Because I don't need to know about it to produce porn.
The problem is many of the online porn "gurus" don't understand porn or marketing porn. And that's the business we are in.
Porn is a stimuli for the fantasy the viewer can grab onto and enjoy himself. Many imagine themselves in the situation being presented. That situation could be some Granny naked in her bed sit or a top model having sex in a mansion. What's required is reality. The viewer has to think it's real. And sadly most of the porn produced today isn't real or just cloned copies of what everyone else is doing. It's massed produced cheap crap. And the only reason fools think traffic is king is because so many of the surfers don't buy.
If 99 people in 100 don't buy, that's a big problem. When 999 in 1,000 don't buy it's become a disaster. These stats are from before the days of Tubes and not banner clicks. The only real solution is to look long and hard at the product and think why don't they buy? Then fix that problem and start converting a lot better. Throwing more traffic at the problem isn't a solution.
If members are only staying 2-3 months on average, that's a problem. It means in a few months they bored with the formula of porn on that site. Sites should be retaining a lot lot longer. The road to success is producing something that the buyer can't get in 100 other places and keeps him hanging on for the next edition. Much like Harry Potter.
Yes producing porn 30 years ago was a lot easier, there were far less places for the buyers to buy. The need to be great wasn't so needed. Also great in 1981 wasn't what would be termed as great in 2011. Today the buyer can get a girl being fucked on a sofa in the same or similar way on 100s if not 1000s of sites. Plus he can get 1000s of free scenes on porn Tubes.
The need to be very good, very unique and really concentrating on the customers needs are paramount. Well they should be.
Still you see people bleating the same solution to all the problems we faced years ago. Traffic. Throwing more traffic at a bad product isn't the way to get more sales. As is clear by now. Converting more of the traffic you have is the solution. Plus anyone, it seems can throw traffic at a site and it makes affiliates king if that's the model.
This solution has turned ratios from 1-50 to 1-5,000 on some sites. Brazzers for one. By not giving the product away for free, not shaping a product and industry to suit affiliates and definitely not paying them what we do. would of meant ratios back in the same realms of 2000. Imagine that with all the additional traffic we have today. Imagine the loss of income and what you could of done with the money.
Yes that's the opportunity lost.
