I always like a preview, before buying a video. No more preview clips from UK Tickling?
I haven't produced preview clips regularly for a long time I'm afraid. It has nothing to do with piracy, although it is a problem - I've even noticed 10 second previews turning up on Youtube and causing issues for models recently. The truth is, I just don't have the time if I'm trying to keep releases coming and stay on top of my website and people's customs. I'm a bit of a perfectionist and not really able to just rush things out, which means that if I do previews then I'm going to spend time getting them right - and then posting them on here, and so on. It's time taken away from actually getting clips ready to release and that's a bigger priority for me - I'd rather release plenty of clips without previews than spend time doing a preview for each and only getting one clip out a week. I do still post a
lot of sample images in my own update threads, however.
In reality, I find that posting previews has no (noticably) positive impact on sales. In fact, as ftkl mentioned, it often seems the other way around.
I am genuinely surprised there is no equivalent of Netflix for adult entertainment in which you pay a modest monthly subscription and get access to a mix of everything. Obviously individual sites and producers offer subscription options but tbh very few sites really feel like you get good value from them as you are limited to content from just one producer and generally don't get much new content per month.
It would be interesting to see if an adult Netflix model could work as producers could theoretically sell their older content (the stuff which isn't really selling on their own sites any more) in bulk to the service provider for a fixed fee and which would give audiences the chance to watch plenty of content without it costing them a fortune but also to get a good taste of the content available from a wider range or producers which they then may chose to buy more recent releases from.
I am no expert on the business side of producing such content but I do know that more mainstream content streaming services such as Netflix, Spotify, etc have helped curb piracy problems for films, TV and music. One survey of Spotify users claimed that 63% of people who used to pirate regularly no longer do since subscribing to Spotify,
This idea has been suggested and discussed many times but in reality it just isn't remotely practical or feasible from a producer point of view. The comparisons to Netflix, Spotify are pretty unrealistic because the tickling video industry is not in the same ball park, or even the same universe from a sales perspective. The model works for these companies because they have tens or hundreds of millions of subscribers generating literal billions of dollars in revenue, that they can then use to support the network infrastructure, license big movies, TV shows, music etc. When you scale it down to a site that will probably generate a few thousand dollars a month at most, it just doesn't work. You still have to build and maintain a secure site with enough server space to host hundreds or thousands of massive files, and loads of bandwidth for fast downloads and streaming - and then you need to pay for a credit card processor. After all that, you need to divide the remaining income across all the studios and have a system in place to pay them all. When all is said and done, the studios would be making tiny pocket change compared to what they can make through their own websites and clipstores.
Even if someone could somehow make it work financially, they would still then have to figure out how to pay each studio. There's a huge gap between studios that make a lot of money and those that make none - you couldn't just pay them all the same amount each month.