TheSquealer

Here is what happened.

I used to have cam studios in Russia. Meaning, i started at the very start. 1998. I had by the time i talked to Paul, 3 large offices and several hundred full time employees... from drivers, to cooks, to cleaners, to security, models, admins, office managers, content managers and so on and so on. Remember, Internet was too expensive for home connections at the time. No one had money. Computers were too expensive for the average person. The average monthly income was about $200.00 or so, our girls made upwards of $1000.00 a month and at the time, they needed to do it from a place that had a big (and unbelievably expensive) broadband connection, computers, cameras etc. So I built and built and built and built.

It was becoming clear that my partnership was going to fall apart. For example, when Visa lowered chargebacks from 2% to 1%, this literally wiped out a lot of cams, dating and adult sites. With competition increasing and transaction volumes decreasing, CBs spiked for many at the very worst time. My partners attitude was basically "well, who cares, we can always find something else to do". I started to panic and I started developing and testing stuff on my own. I built a whole new cam system and this time, I built a very slick solo model system - each model i chose, having her own site, her own content, her own members and having the opportunity to really make a great deal more money if she wanted to work. I made a test site around one girl. It looked like a solo girl site, really selling the personality, except it was focused on her being live. When she was on cam, that was displayed on the main page, when she wasn't, her "girlfriends" were. The sites required an email join, i started buying ppc traffic to them wiht my partner which was doing 1:5... and converting to paid members at about 1:20. The numbers were crazy. We were excited. We had a lot of money and wanted to create them 10 at a time.

I began to play with hiring photographers in St Petersburg to shoot content. It went horribly. There were a few amazing photographers who were known and either ran their own sites or shot for big names (club seventeen etc) and charged western prices. The rest, basically shot passport photos with nothing in between. What I wanted to do was shoot a basic content package for each solo site... like 35 sets and 20 videos or something like that. Nothing high end, but not garbage. I reached out to a few Czech guys and other producers and it was happening right at the time that the content biz was falling apart (remember J$tyles/Markham/Aaron M battle over cheap content packages?? The board fights?). Many content guys pushed back with answers like "i am not going to shoot for lower rates" etc. Which is fine. Paul and a few others agreed to do them in large packages - like 10 girls at a time. Russian girls could get Visas to CZ, everything there was cheap. I'd just rent a couple apartments for a few months for a few hundred a month in Brno. It was a nice treat for them. I could get all my content. Life would have been nice.

Paul and I agreed to a price per package. Something like $2500.00 each. What he said specifically was that Eva would shoot, not him (because he was too amazing and too expensive). I honestly didn't care because I was seeing the results of what we shot ourselves and it was crazy, the concept was good and it was working better than expected. I just needed content that didn't suck and that was better than what I did. So.... i agreed with him on basic details and that i'd fly over from Russia to Brno, we'd meet, discuss it all further and i'd make a decision that week on who'd i'd use for shooting.

As i explained in that thread. I never spoke of any of this until that thread only because his wife was really nice to us, because we'd had dinner at his home etc and I tried to be respectful of these other facts in spite of him fully melting down when his content business tanked - but talking about how great he was, how successful he was, how he'd done so much business with everyone etc. The truth was that he was both broke and desperate and losing everything at the time I was there.

I flew there with a manager of mine who would be dealing with him directly after we started biz. We drove from Prague to Brno, met him and he suggested we go to a sort of Euro Hypermarket type shopping place and sit and have coffee and talk. From the moment we sat down, it felt like he was someone that had just escaped from the local insane asylum, was off his meds and was posing as a business person. I knew within minutes that I was not going to do any business with him... but I was trying to see how things played out and his wife had already invited us to dinner the next day, we'd already agreed to spend time at his "studio" and that they'd show us around and so on. As i said in that thread, he was loud. He was obnoxious. People are walking by and namely guys with younger teen girls and he's loudly saying thing things like "i'd really love to bury my tongue in her ass".

We were both mortified and extremely embarrassed. It's not like almost no one speaks English and couldn't understand him. We had to make excuses and get out of there, agreeing to meet later. Anyway, long story short, it went from bad to worse. I've seen Paul at shows, I've been at dinners with him and he was usually pretty quiet and subdued ... like an introverted person who was just shy. What I saw in Brno, with him trying to impress us was literally insane behavior. I described it in that thread in great detail... and of course, he was denying that he'd ever met me, called me a liar and so on, in spite of me even describing the inside of his house or even tiny details like the annoying little bell he had that rang on the computer every time his "bargain basement content" store made a 9.99 sale which was loud outside of his little office, with the door opening to the living room of his tiny little place... or I described being at a photo shoot with him, which he denied even happened, until i posted pictures.

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Yes, fewer illegal immigrants working equates to more job opportunities for American citizens.

Rochard