Boy a certain someone sure stopped mouthing off all of a sudden didn't he...
Well, I
did say I was quitting. Why would I keep hanging around and arguing with you people? Honestly though, I started a new job last week and given the amount of stress I was under in the months prior, I just walked away from a lot of things and decided to relax before things got busy.
That said...
Over the years I've made mentions of you updating certain technical aspects, maybe rethinking some blocking, things like this.
While I'm not going to say you're wrong, I don't recall
ever speaking to you about my content, and certainly don't recall ever getting any criticism from you, constructive or otherwise. In fact, one of the
biggest complaints I've had is that
nobody has been able to point me to why my material might not be moving. Whenever anyone does, it's usually something like "do more F/F" or "do nylons", and then I do F/F or nylons and it doesn't do any better. The
only two people I can ever remember
actually saying anything along those lines were Kelly Sage (and she was being a jerk about it because she thought I'd insulted her) and Wolf, who made some kind of offhand comment about there being "too much you" in the videos, and he didn't elaborate, so I could only speculate on what he meant. And even so, I've done tons of different kinds of videos with tons of different kinds of blocking and shot styles. Asking people which videos they were actually talking about when they said these things was usually met with silence.
So no, it's not that I'm "ignoring" anyone - I have
literally never gotten any feedback on my videos that I am aware of. If I'm in error on this, by all means - link me to the threads. And calling out the few people who said a few of my earlier models "didn't seem that ticklish" don't count - because we've been arguing about that regarding every model who deigns to shoot in this niche since the beginning of time.
That said, I
do know my lighting could use work, but it
has gotten better and is highly dependent on where I shoot. After all, I don't have a studio or a rig, and I can't justify getting either one purely for this endeavor.
But, I know I have said that I am not convinced that better lighting, f'rex, would suddenly put me into the Top 10, because at the time that I said that, there was a guy in the Top 10 who was literally filming on a potato and blocking even worse than I was, whose content, from what I saw of it, was pretty lackluster. So no, I wasn't convinced. I'm pretty sure that conversation was had years ago, so who knows how I feel about it now.
I've watched as other people have given you similar advice.
Again, I don't recall this. One thing I've said - repeatedly, mind - over the years is that people never actually address producers directly. No one has ever come to me and said, "Arch, your XYZ sucks. Fix it and I'll buy your stuff." They post passive-aggressive threads here targeting "producers" - and I've been criticized for assuming they mean me when they clearly don't, so maybe you're confusing that kind of nebulous "feedback" with advice I've supposedly been given. But again, if I'm mistaken, please point me towards it because I'm really curious how I may have gotten such a horrible disconnect going on.
I have never seen you receive this advice with anything short of immediate, usually straight up indignant dismissal of the advice.
Again, link me. I know I've said things like "If you expect us to improve XYZ, give us an incentive to do so", and I stand by that. I'm not even remotely convinced that using a shotgun mic (as I've seen people here say we should) is going to suddenly make my sales jump high enough to even offset the initial expenditure. To again go back to lighting, I lucked out once and got to use a pretty nice diffuser that a photographer friend had left behind. The visual quality of those clips turned out great, and the tickling itself was phenom IMHO (one of my few F/F shoots before you accuse me of puffing myself up - I wasn't even on camera), but those clips didn't do much more than break even.
However - I
have improved numerous technical aspects of my process. As soon as I figured out how to properly white-balance my footage, I started doing it as a matter of course. You'd never know that, though, because who does?
When you talk about the traffic you think you're owed
I get that you think I'm an asshole, but acting like I think I'm "owed" anything is probably
THE most uncharitable reading of what I've said that you could possibly make. I have never once said I was owed anything. Maybe it was wrong of me to actually believe all of the people who've told me my stuff is good and question as to why they weren't buying it, but I got over that. I'm not happy about it, but I'm over it. I
have said that this community in general doesn't like to pay for stuff, and I point to that as an example. I'm pretty sure that's not wrong given we're - yet again - talking about piracy.
I'm aware that I'm not owed shit. Happy?
and not seeming to consider that those platforms probably shouldn't be used to gauge your genuine fanbase considering how big re-hosting/"tickle general" accounts are.
This is a good point. I agree with you. My comment to turtleboy was rooted in the fact that on the rare occasions I do get feedback, it's usually positive - and obviously, I stand by my work myself so how else am I supposed to gauge its quality? I've had at least two other producers - respected ones - compliment my material. I think I have a leg to stand on, here.
You state over and over again you have no delusions of grandeur, or that you assume you're better than other studios.
Because it's true. There are some things I feel I do better than most, and some things I don't do as well. I can't put it any more plainly than that.
But time and time again you make it apparent you really do think you're consistently turning out gold and are baffled that it's not moving hundreds of copies, and you're clearly frustrate that your audience is apparently failing you by not keeping you profitable.
Consistently? I'll be the first to admit that my stuff varies in quality for all sorts of reasons. But yes, I have done some good work and I stand by it. Gold? That's obviously debatable, but there are a few videos I've done that I am very proud of. Some have done well, some have not. But all of them have fallen under the "real tickling/girls next door" stuff that people here are constantly crying that they want, and when presented with clips of those videos, not one of 'em has come back and said "yeah no, I don't like that and here's why". The rare few who have? I respect their preferences. We all like different things.
If this isn't the case, then I'm not sure how you can't realize how your repeated frustrations are being perceived by people.
What, you don't think I know that some people here think I'm an asshole? I'm surprised Park was the only one who got in line to kick me after I'd left (and you, in spite of "not wanting to be sarcastic" - pull the other one, it's got bells on). Here's the thing about that; I stopped caring about three and a half years ago. I was pretty chill when I first started doing this. That deteriorated. My sales haven't gone up
or down since I stopped being nice around here, and I've said that before. I mean, what's gonna happen, my sales are gonna drop? lol
Go back and look at the newer studios that are doing better than you and compare their earliest stuff to what they do now.
Ask those studios if they received enough profit from their earlier videos to sink into improved production or if they kept throwing good money after bad before they came to their senses, only for it to pan out in the end. Or maybe they keep sinking money into their fetish because they have a bunch of it to blow? We don't always know. It's quite true that a lot of them have improved over time. I remember looking at the earliest Stryker videos and thinking they were awful. He definitely got better.
And as I said up yonder, so have I. Thing is, I have only been able to do it in small ways, because I can't justify expenditures that aren't going to bring in more money. Things like better lighting, etc. have not convinced me that they're what's killing my sales. I'm open to being persuaded, though, but I have the sales figures to back up my position. But hey, when I have to drive two hours to work with a really great model and the best shooting space she can offer up is her bedroom, where the lighting is sub par... I make do.
I'm sincerely asking, without any intended sarcasm or attack; how long can it be literally everyone else's fault except your own that you're not where you feel you deserve to be in the pecking order?
LOL. Yeah, that's definitely being asked in good faith. I'll humor you, though. As I said above, the many, numerous times I've asked, offered compensation for, and eventually
demanded people to answer my questions about my observations on the industry were met with complete silence. Or, occasionally, totally inactionable "feedback" that did not jibe with the numbers I was seeing, or results from other studios. Then again, you've got me curious now as to what exactly I've been "dismissing" so hell, maybe I've been in a coma for the last three years. I hope you actually manage to find some of it and show me. If it's the conversation I'm thinking of, where we were talking about why Stuck in the Stocks was doing so well when he was literally doing the exact opposite of everything people were telling me I needed to do (and honestly, I didn't think his models were all that great either, but that's subjective) I remember that I did think about it for a while after the discussion was over, but I could not for the life of me come to any kind of conclusion that would provide an actionable plan. So no, I didn't dismiss it, I was just at a loss as to what to do with it. It's true that some studios have "it" - but I've always felt that "it" was an elusive thing, and that if there were a formula to this then we'd all be sitting on our yachts at the end of the day.
Thanks for the honest discourse, though. I wasted my scant two hours of free time this evening typing this when I should have been working on something else. You're probably the only person I'd have bothered to do that for.
In closing,
ParkCollege0 said:
Keep convincing yourself that other producers do better than you because they're "cheap/creepy".
Get bent, you illiterate fuckstick. That's not what I said and you fucking know it.
And I don't plan on coming back to this thread again. Anyone who wants to discuss my "retirement" is free to PM me about it.
