Originally Posted by Loki

Actually, I am in fact BOTH an artist AND a business person lol, I've ran MANY successful businesses over the years both on and offline, and I did in fact live and breath the "back it up" rules, but no matter how many backups you have you can not control equipment / media failures or down right fuckovers by 3rd parties.

Without actually knowing me (the real me not just what little info I post to a forum) you have no way of knowing what I've done over the years or what I've been through, I've never been one to brag so very few really do know those things, so I don't fault you on your opinions or observations of me and my situation.

Truth be told I had a shitload of money but I lost it all bailing out family, some here might remember when I sold off my offline biz and my house to move to the woods and take care of my grandmother, I blew through over $40k of my savings saving the lake house from foreclosure due to back taxes and missed mortgage payments not too mention a shitload of checking issues because people were taking advantage of a senile women (my grandmother)

When it was all over, my father put her in a home and stole the cottage out from under me, and I was literally left with my clothes and my computers (Thanks Dad) forced to couch surf the next few years and TRY to rebuild my savings, but without that nest egg I had it's been a bitch to say the least.

I have also done exactly what you've suggested, (Having someone do it all for me) and it just did not work out, with this niche you can NOT throw out the ideas and visions and just do it like you would with "real" content, and my "vision / ideas" were ignored and the results were well... shit lol

One thing I KNOW about this industry is the toon market, I have LIVED it since 1999, I've watched and tracked the trends, and I know EXACTLY what the surfers want AND what will KEEP them recurring month after month, year after year, I've shared parts of this little pearl with other companies and they have ALL ignored it, and THAT is where my "ace in the hole" has always come into play, My sites will feature AND Promote what the other sites just refuse to do. (But then again THAT is the core difference between an Artists paysites and a Companies "cookie cutter" paysite.

I've spent years trying to educate companies on how they SHOULD handle their toon sites, I've created a network of toon artists and TRIED (and failed) to get companies on board with that network to get the various toon companies to network with eachother to share tips and tricks and artists, but in the end they are just too greedy and or worried about loosing a sale or two, From a business standpoint it made perfect sense to me to have a community of artists and companies working together to make all their sites bigger and better. (you'd be surprised how many artists had / have NO IDEA they could SELL their content to a porn company, they just sit on fan board making single images for "fans" and thought that's all there was too it. and as for that network I did not control it, I did not own it and the plug was pulled so now it's gone lol

And as for selling my content over and over, that's also not an issue, unlike other content sellers NONE of my packages have or will be sold more then 10 times, and above and beyond that, I only sell a portion of what I've created, I have a great stockpile of exclusive never sold content that will be the backbone of my own sites, I've NEVER been one to sell "everything" lol

But back to the back up rule, I never lost any of my content, I had TONS (still do) of backups for that, what I lost that killed me was 3rd party scripts I had created (and was NEVER given masters of) and the coder "found jesus" and vanished, no problem though till the servers all went down, and the backups and sql backups I had were damaged, let alone I (not being a programmer) had no idea how to reuse them.

As Selena mentioned MANY people got burned bad on that hosting deal, many people had to close up shop all together and leave the web, I myself BEING a good businessman instead sat back and retooled my entire business plan and started offering content B2B and I've sustained pretty well from 2007 till this past July when the content market pretty much dropped for many producers.

I'm sure I could still make a great living producing and selling content if I just slashed the shit out of my prices and upped my allowed slots per package but then I'd be no better then others out there who's content is on damn near every site online, I want to keep my content as unsaturated as I can, so I don't do that.

Now before someone decides it's time to call the wha-bu-lance, I'm not bitching and moaning or crying here, I'm just trying to explain a few things as I guess people don't know the whole deal here, or my history. Just wanted to lay a few more things out there.

One way or another I'll be back up and running, OR I'll just quietly walk off into the night as it were, I'm bucking for the first rather then the later but without some capital it's just not gonna happen.

and as for offline jobs... not where I live been looking for months nada (but then there's a reason Michigan is the highest for unemployed I guess lol)

-Loki-