Interestingly this has happened before in our specific corner of the adult industry. In fact, it's what started it.
As the VCR became part of most homes in the US in the early 1980's the Adult Porn industry experienced a massive growth phase. Unsurprisingly a large segment of the consumer base who would never think of walking into a 'Adult movie house' was more then happy to buy video tapes of adult fun to see in the privacy of their own living rooms. The Adult segment exploded and more stuff then ever was produced and many many companies were born.
This produced a very competitive marketplace, and as things started to form up companies started to look for things that they could expand their market share with, and several of them went with fetish. And they ran down the list of what seemed to be the biggest groups; BDSM, Feet, English Discipline (Spanking OTK especially), Watersports, and Tickling. Yup, our fetish was in just under the wire on the 'big 5' that the companies saw as economically viable then. And stuff got produced. It's still being sold. This was the Vid-Tech and Calstar and Platinum videos that were all wings of big traditional porn houses.
This stuff joined the rest of the Porn being sold in stores. And it did sell. Well enough for them to keep making it. And yes. the quality was, to be polite, highly variable. Most of it has the look of "Hey, we brought in three girls for this traditional porn shoot, lets do a spanking, tickling, whatever few shorts after and get our money's worth on our models.
This worked until technology shifted and it became possible for smaller production houses to start filming and releasing things thanks to cheeper video cameras and editing suites that didn't cost 10K and up. This era was the first specialty fetish production era with houses like FM, Harmony and Cue. The big porn houses sales declined on their fetish stuff and eventually it wasn't worth making got them any longer and they stopped.
Cut to today.
The major porn producers Brazzzers being one of the biggest are hurting. Piracy has decimated them, Camgirls, and anyone with a camera and the will to be nude open C4S stores, hell there are sites that amateurs post on because they like to be seen. Profits are down. Market Share is down for the big boys.
So they start to cast about for ways to grab more cash. They specialize in putting lots of stuff out fast, learned from staying ahead of pirates. They have a huge talent pool that they can draw on because they have hired these models for traditional porn for ages. They can pull in dozen models, rent a million dollar mansion for a days shoot and turn out product that LOOKS amazing. So why not target a fetish and send out a blast of material and see how it goes? It costs no more then making a few mainstream vids. Why not?
So they will try.
They will be disappointed. They don't really know how each of the specialty markets operates. Tickling has been kicked inn the groin by piracy harder then they have. Specialty markets have specialty tastes. They don't know what annoys us in videos and trust me there will be a lot of that in their product. It will look better then Calstar's but it will have as many "goochie-goochie-goos!" in it, with poor tickling, and so forth as those 80's classics had. Will they bother screening like TA, TI, CzT and FrT do to see if models are really ticklish? Probably not, because if they can fake it, just like main stream it should work right?
I'm sure there will be a few gems in it. Calstar and Vid-Tech managed that on occasion. They will also. But it won't be the line expansion they want profit wise.
Technology has pushed porn into smaller and smaller houses of production. And made it easier to release then ever. The big houses are on the wrong side of the tech curve again.
And the list of models that has replied to that thread is pretty full of models that have done tickling work elsewhere. Not all of them, but many. Models active in the bigger porn world book just about any job that they have no aversion to, and fits their schedule. Got a day free and a small house wants to book you to get tied up and tickled? Sure. Daisy Duccati is a great example, she's been tickled in Fetish Pros, and a few one women clip producers. Never for a house in 'our' specific world, but if TA or TI wanted to book her and her rates were reasonable she'd be there.
In the long run this will mean little.
Everyone watching already knows the game mostly.
Myriads