Piracy has definitely had an enormous impact. I won’t speak to the quality as such, but it’s easy to draw lines between the stark rise of stolen media and the nosedive in production value. Which isn’t to leave out the ease and availability with which more people have been able to produce their own videos, of course.
Again without commenting on quality, the biggest difference I’ve noticed -and this began long before TickleAbuse was sold- is the shift in providing any kind of narrative or unique setting. For many, many years now the vast majority of tickling are model tied to bed/model tied to table. That’s it, that’s the video. In the earlier days, producers were more inclined to include some semblance of a story/plot, and shoot at different locations. There was more creativity, generally speaking.
I’ve always preferred the videos with some loose story structure, but I fully accept that’s a personal opinion. There’s absolutely nothing objectively wrong with ‘model tied to table’. And I get it, I get why producers aren’t willing to go that extra mile anymore, and haven’t for years (decades?). Why put in the extra effort and money when most of the viewership will end up seeing it for free anyway?
It is much less about a fetishist with a fantasy and a camera and far more about the bottom line than it ever has been. I don’t blame them, people gotta make money, it just ends up being creatively less interesting in the pursuit of it.