The Last Laugh
3rd Level Green Feather
- Joined
- Apr 21, 2001
- Messages
- 4,588
- Points
- 38
...and MTP, and Tickling Paradise, and may others. It wasn't quite as bad as it is now, but there was still a lot of competition. It's not like the tickling video market has ever been very big to begin with. Of course, it was a challenge for everyone, not just me. I've never been very big, but I was still competition to all the other nonetheless. We're all in the same boat.
Thank you, I appreciate it. However, the thing is, even though I had a burst of popularity for a while, it quickly settled down. The initial enthusiasm had a lot to do with The Last Laugh being a new company, a novelty of sorts. People are interested in new companies. For a while, anyway. Even so-so ones attract a fair amount of attention when they begin. It doesn't last, though. Oh, I won't say that things are terrible for me, and I think I've managed to make myself fairly well-known around here, even though I'm far from a big player. But things have never been like the first couple of months when it comes to attention and praise. And I only had one video out, so it's not like I was rolling on gold. In any case, being appreciated and lauded for one's personal approach doesn't automatically translate into sales or success. It helps, but it's not everything.
Aside from fewer sales, another thing that one can notice about not being a new producer anymore, after having been in the business for a few months, is that one's posts gets a lot fewer replies. Kind of like people take you for granted, which I admit is only natural. That means one's threads get pushed off the first page of forums very quickly and are forgotten. I know it's all part of the game, but it's still pretty frustrating.
It's actually much worse nowadays, though. First, there are many more producers, obviously. Second, now that most producers are dedicated to releasing clips, as opposed to physical videos, that means each producer posts many more threads, since most of the time each thread covers one clip that lasts a few minutes, instead of a whole video. Frankly, the high number of producers doesn't worry me as much as the unbelievable speed of thread rotation on forums, since it means getting a whole lot less exposure (personally, the main forums are my only means of advertisement). I mean, you work real hard on producing a clip, you're pleased with it, you announce it on a forum hoping to attract attention, and then the thread is gone from the first page in half a day, getting very few hits. The situation is actually worse on the TMF, for some reason, but it's still pretty bad here too. Naturally, the companies that are the most productive and put out the most clips tend to have the upper hand on the forums, and probably when it comes to sales as well. It's only fair, but it's hard on the smaller vendors who don't produce as much volume.
I tell you, it wasn't like that when most people still sold videos on VHS or DVD, with a lot fewer clips. It meant a lot fewer posts. During the first few years I barely released one video per 3 months or so. And I only posted one announcement for each. I didn't make all that much money, but somehow it worked well enough, and it was a lot less work. Doing something like that nowadays would be insane. Now I have to release at least one video per month and announce each individual clip (say from 6 to 10 clips per video), which is how things work now. And even then I get a lot less exposure than I got with one VHS/DVD post a few years ago. It's crazy. Of course, I'm talking for myself, here, but I'm sure other producers are living the same thing.
