Quote:
Originally Posted by Paul Markham
How much more would you have made if those sites were great sites?
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Wow you can miss even replying to Paul Markham if you log in only twice a year in gfy. About "great" and "quality" you mentioned Met-Art vs some Roald's random stuff he say is not great but yet it sells. I happen to have worked for Met-Art since early to pre-2010 era, then independently, then ended up sellng to Roald in 2016, so I'll tell my 2 cents.
In the old times at Met-Art, I was picking the cam girls (yes it was me doing casting but it was mostly remote if someone wonders how lucky this guy or something) to be within the site standards and skipping 90% of applicants. I been cruel with old-looking, little fat, large nose etc. models - I left out 90% of fetishes, including tatoo'd, this was Met-Art in early 2000s!
In studios (mostly Ukraine, Russia, some Czech - only much later in Romania too), we had 3CCD Sony/Panasonic cameras on tripods, lights to make those artsy shadows, and the girls were acting shy and teasing all the time, often with theme shows including special clothes (even costumes) and items.
Almost no girl worked from home, for quality control but also since no internet connection was cheap+fast enough at the time. We paid girls a nice fixed amount per hour + tips. The photoshoot and the live shows were alike: softcore and long for today's standards. 1+ hour private shows were common, $250+ cost and up so we had almost only whales and ages of customers were mostly 40-60 yr old - shows were all pre-paid appointments of minimum 30 minutes or so without free chat, a dream for models. They all miss those days and still cry about it when I hear from them.
Then myfreecams and tubes and so on. Then the 2008 crisis, then chaturbate and so on. Met-Art subsiding artsy public shows was no more feasible and switched to streamate whitelabel (smart move honestly), and I spun out to continue the stuff independently in stubborn way.
However, except for mainstream celebs like Bella Thorne, things changed forever about quality/price thing. I made some updates in modern directions, introduced a tips site (tubecamgirl - nice name lol), started to accept more kinds of models from their messy homes, but still with some limits on weight and looks... (called me nazi in cam girl forums...) and did not allow boys on cam (even Hegre had introduced that)... I been so conservative.
Like before, I still decided what models and content the user's will see, rather than register everyone and let the free market's demand-offer rule all automatically, whatever weird the home page caps would have been looked.
When I sold to Roald, I told them that "the site's customers are not used to see boys in cam, no b+g action there ever happened", and they replied: "They will get used" - LOL... that's a so natural and I missed to see it myself for like 10 years.
In adult the concept of "great quality" is subjective and only money talks - someone is bored by artsy perfect shy models and would rather pay for trash-looking gonzo punk rock fatties. If you run an adult company today is better to provide everything for everyone's taste - you more likely get lucky if you try many small things; limiting to one niche only and strictly curated models/content is quite ambitious and requires 100 times the luck, financially.
Ok these were many cents.