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- Apr 2, 2001
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Max brings up an important point that speaks to this discussion, that of Jeff's motivations in the underlying theme that Magic Touch would have. And producer theme is a very significant factor in our fetishes history.
The tickling media industry has been now active for effectively thirty years now, thirty five if you want to be a stickler. And interestingly those years break up into some very specific sub era's based on producer approach, or technological change. Sometimes both.
The first era of the industry runs from the mid 80's to the mid 90's. A surprisingly long time looking back today. This was the era of the professional porn company. Cal-Star, Vid-Tec, Platinum are all names that one may recognize from this period.
The big pro companies got into fetish because they realized there was money in it. They came up in the 70's with traditional porn that was filmed for theater distribution, and with the arrival of the VCR in the early 80's sales exploded. That technological innovation changed the porn industry. People who'd never go to that sleazy theater downtown were more then happy to rent or buy a tape to watch at home. The cash rolled in.
Flush with cash the big producers reinvested to grow the market. They realized there were several fetish groups that had big enough audiences to be worth chasing. Bondage, FemDom, S&M, English Discipline (Which we know today as spanking) Watersports, and just on the edge of viability Tickling. Yup, we were a big enough group to be seen by corporate porn makers and catered to. And thus videos for us started to appear.
The porn companies used the same formulas for their tickling porn that they used for their regular stuff. They would hire women, toss them into some silly scripted story, and film. More often then not the tickling sucked. The ticklers sucked, the fact that feathers and feather dusters were used for everything sucked, sometimes the models were clearly 40 minutes away from needing their next fix, or 30 minutes since the last one. There was no end to the bad. But sometimes there were gems of scenes that had the bite of reality to them. A ticklish lee got matched with a sadistic Ler. One would get tape after tape after tape hoping for one of those. And tapes cost $60+ too. But as many above said, there was no other game in town. So we bought.
The next phase was a short one in relation. It was the era of the Specialty Producer. One of the hurdles that kept the market in the hands of the big porn companies was that video cameras and more importantly video tape editing bays were expensive as all hell. Very few could afford them. But technologies march stomped that hurdle flat as the 80’s turned to the 90’s. Both cameras and editing tools got cheaper, and this allowed the entry of smaller players, ones that often focused on specific fetishes only. They tended to be founded by people who lived the fetish they filmed. Harmony and Close-Up came from bondage fans. FM from foot fetishists. These companies focused on doing what they liked. And their material could really resonate with our community. Seeing it in relation to the Porn companies stuff was mind-blowing. The ratio of good to bad scenes was way up. Tapes though still expensive almost always had something that you’d like on it.
Further more, since these companies were often run by people in the lifestyle they often cast models from the lifestyle. Harmony being the best example of this. Ashley Reene, Whitney Prescott, Darla Crane, Cathryn Beaumont, Ariel Cole, and so on. We now had names that we could hear that told us what to expect before we bought. It has Whitney in it? You’d know what you’d get. Harmony made it? You knew the formula.
Stories still ruled in this era. You had a plot that strong together the tickling. Lots of people got used to the fast forward button. But then we know where that was from skipping all those crappy scenes in the Vid-Techs we used to have.
These Specialty producers defined their era and captured the marketplace. During the few years they ruled the professional porn producers slowly stopped filming mostly. Their stuff had stopped selling, rightly so, as it was sub-par.
The next change that happened was the Internet. It removed the hurdle of reaching the buyer that had existed before. You no longer needed to have the cash to put an add in a porn mag. You could talk on newsgroups or put up a web site. This further leveled the playing field and allowed to yet smaller producers to enter the mix.
FM made this transition, pivoting to a web based sales company. But new faces appeared. Jeff’s Magic Touch was one, Tickling Paradise and the Tickler in Black’s Real Tickling (TC) among them. These new companies were often one person shops, and located in places that traditionally did not have adult content production in them, and thus no associated model base.
This era that ran from the mid 90’s to the early 2000’s is marked by two things. The first is that sales were done on the web, the second that the media came to you on a video tape in the mail. Magic Touch was a pioneer in that it was the first producer to accept credit cards on the web. Jeff’s understanding of that feature being important was a huge realization, and a key to his success. The companies of this era made buying the videos easier then ever before. No money orders, no 2-3 week waits as your letter went there and the stuff came back. Click and pay and a week later vids in the mailbox.
The format of the media also shifted. Now things were being made by tickling fetishists. And they were tired of the silly stories, and crummy tickling and bondage. So they moved to the ’tie them up and tickle them’ format. They still supplied an hour of material in general on a tape. This allowed one to really get to know a lee, as you’d see a LOT of them getting tickled. Mary from MTP is still remembered today as this thread shows. And while Jeff wanted to film real girls with real reactions he was also in a location where real girls were all that he really had access to, as did most of the small producers at the time. They hired who they could locally.
The other feature of this period of note is that Real Tickling produced the first new ‘name’ tickling celebrity in Pricilla James. Like the Harmony models before her, Pricilla would prove to be a draw all on her own, and would be a harbinger of things to come in later eras. TC also spoke to the fans desire for better bondage in their media also. They started to show the early device bondages that we’d get to know much better in later times.
As the early 2000’s passed the web moved from dial-up to high speed based. And this changed our industry again. Now media didn’t have to travel through the mail. It could be sent over the web. No physical object was needed. Things were still a bit slow by todays standards, so the concept of the ‘clip’ became the norm. A shorter 8 to 13 minute format that ‘fit’ the download speeds of the day better. So things shifted again.
The clip format was perfect for the ‘tie and tickle’ style that had come into vogue. Stories all but dropped away. Interestingly producers tended to keep to the $1 per minute pricing that the old $60 per hour long tapes featured. But since the clips were smaller, it seemed that prices came down. In reality one got much less, but it was volume packed with the exact sort of tickling you wanted. That is if you liked ‘tie and tickle’.
Freed from a lot of carrying costs that physical production held, the smaller producers now found themselves in a wide open market with almost no entry hurdles. Just about anyone with a camera and a iMac could edit clips and get a CC processor and sell. This led to a battle of differentiation. Or as the trade magazines call it “House style” The end of this era would be marked by dozens of companies coming and going, and everyone trying to build an identity.
It turns out that identity came to be perceived around two factors. Bondage quality, and celebrity Lers.
The late ’00’s turned into the teens and we saw Tickle Abuse, Tickle Intensive, French Tickling, UK Tickling, and Czech Tickling rising to the top of the pack. Each of them featured higher end device bondage, with Tickling Abuse leading the pack, thanks to its founders background in carpentry. TA set the standard in device bondage for tickling and was rewarded. It also developed not one, but two celebrity Lers in Tasha and Brook, and as a bonus several celebrity lees also. Not since the early 90’s were there so many models who had name recognition. Czech repeated this model in Europe. And all of these producers cast as many ‘girl next door’ types as pro models. All of them count draw from big population pools in near cities, and had a lot of casting luck. There was a mix.
But with success also comes saturation. All these producers filled the market. And that is before the dozens of other producers are considered. There was/is no shortage of tickling media out there. So much of it in fact that profitability of the models these companies used started to slip. It was harder. And that fact brought this era to a close and moved us along to the next one. The second factor that added to this change was Clips4Sale which killed the last barrier to entry into the market. No need for a site now! C4S would handle that. This increased the competition and saturation ten fold.
Starting about 2013 or so we entered the era of diversification. Orgasm play was the biggest facet of this. Always close fetish friend of tickling, Forced orgasms were a natural expansion for many companies. Others tried to fill specific sub groups of the fetish, buried in sand clips, super hero tickling, storyline based material (Coming full circle back to the earliest eras) These extra features are often things that a ‘girl-next-door’ model is not down with doing. It’s one thing to get tickled on cam, totally another to get nude and have a few orgasms forced by a hitachi. So the average model moved to the professional girl, who does fetish videos as a living. The environment of what the industry produces became more inline to the average person's mind as porn. And that is a hurdle for talent attraction.
So we find ourselves in an era of plenty. There is no shortage of tickling clips out there. The bigger players are needfully diversified to maintain their market share, which means they are going to cater to multiple aspects of the tickling fetish and close ones (Orgasm, Foot worship, watersports, and some sadism) with an ever changing group of smaller producers that do pure tickling trying to find an audience that is big enough to make things more then a hobby. Which is very very difficult.
How will things change next? What technology or innovation will shift things next, and produce a new leader? It’s hard to know.
What we do know is that none of the previous eras can be revisited. They were all products of their specific times. Unique results of the technology and limits of years past.
Cam-Girls are becoming powerful. The Web-Cam industry has disrupted the old big powerful porn producers. And they are often girls next door too. Lots of tickling happens on MyFreeCams, Chatterbate, and Streammates as easily as tipping a duo that is working together. Perhaps we’ll move to an on-demand live model next. Tickle Intensive or Czech or a totally new name will announce a nightly web stream you can buy entry into, and you’ll tip pre-bought tokens to get the tickling you want. And you can record it yourself too. Insex does this with hardcore S&M now, as does Kink (and people DO request tickling in those live feeds).
The future is rarely what we expect, and it rarely seems as good as what we first experienced when we were discovering this thing that turns us on. Those formative days. But change will keep coming.
Myriads
The tickling media industry has been now active for effectively thirty years now, thirty five if you want to be a stickler. And interestingly those years break up into some very specific sub era's based on producer approach, or technological change. Sometimes both.
The first era of the industry runs from the mid 80's to the mid 90's. A surprisingly long time looking back today. This was the era of the professional porn company. Cal-Star, Vid-Tec, Platinum are all names that one may recognize from this period.
The big pro companies got into fetish because they realized there was money in it. They came up in the 70's with traditional porn that was filmed for theater distribution, and with the arrival of the VCR in the early 80's sales exploded. That technological innovation changed the porn industry. People who'd never go to that sleazy theater downtown were more then happy to rent or buy a tape to watch at home. The cash rolled in.
Flush with cash the big producers reinvested to grow the market. They realized there were several fetish groups that had big enough audiences to be worth chasing. Bondage, FemDom, S&M, English Discipline (Which we know today as spanking) Watersports, and just on the edge of viability Tickling. Yup, we were a big enough group to be seen by corporate porn makers and catered to. And thus videos for us started to appear.
The porn companies used the same formulas for their tickling porn that they used for their regular stuff. They would hire women, toss them into some silly scripted story, and film. More often then not the tickling sucked. The ticklers sucked, the fact that feathers and feather dusters were used for everything sucked, sometimes the models were clearly 40 minutes away from needing their next fix, or 30 minutes since the last one. There was no end to the bad. But sometimes there were gems of scenes that had the bite of reality to them. A ticklish lee got matched with a sadistic Ler. One would get tape after tape after tape hoping for one of those. And tapes cost $60+ too. But as many above said, there was no other game in town. So we bought.
The next phase was a short one in relation. It was the era of the Specialty Producer. One of the hurdles that kept the market in the hands of the big porn companies was that video cameras and more importantly video tape editing bays were expensive as all hell. Very few could afford them. But technologies march stomped that hurdle flat as the 80’s turned to the 90’s. Both cameras and editing tools got cheaper, and this allowed the entry of smaller players, ones that often focused on specific fetishes only. They tended to be founded by people who lived the fetish they filmed. Harmony and Close-Up came from bondage fans. FM from foot fetishists. These companies focused on doing what they liked. And their material could really resonate with our community. Seeing it in relation to the Porn companies stuff was mind-blowing. The ratio of good to bad scenes was way up. Tapes though still expensive almost always had something that you’d like on it.
Further more, since these companies were often run by people in the lifestyle they often cast models from the lifestyle. Harmony being the best example of this. Ashley Reene, Whitney Prescott, Darla Crane, Cathryn Beaumont, Ariel Cole, and so on. We now had names that we could hear that told us what to expect before we bought. It has Whitney in it? You’d know what you’d get. Harmony made it? You knew the formula.
Stories still ruled in this era. You had a plot that strong together the tickling. Lots of people got used to the fast forward button. But then we know where that was from skipping all those crappy scenes in the Vid-Techs we used to have.
These Specialty producers defined their era and captured the marketplace. During the few years they ruled the professional porn producers slowly stopped filming mostly. Their stuff had stopped selling, rightly so, as it was sub-par.
The next change that happened was the Internet. It removed the hurdle of reaching the buyer that had existed before. You no longer needed to have the cash to put an add in a porn mag. You could talk on newsgroups or put up a web site. This further leveled the playing field and allowed to yet smaller producers to enter the mix.
FM made this transition, pivoting to a web based sales company. But new faces appeared. Jeff’s Magic Touch was one, Tickling Paradise and the Tickler in Black’s Real Tickling (TC) among them. These new companies were often one person shops, and located in places that traditionally did not have adult content production in them, and thus no associated model base.
This era that ran from the mid 90’s to the early 2000’s is marked by two things. The first is that sales were done on the web, the second that the media came to you on a video tape in the mail. Magic Touch was a pioneer in that it was the first producer to accept credit cards on the web. Jeff’s understanding of that feature being important was a huge realization, and a key to his success. The companies of this era made buying the videos easier then ever before. No money orders, no 2-3 week waits as your letter went there and the stuff came back. Click and pay and a week later vids in the mailbox.
The format of the media also shifted. Now things were being made by tickling fetishists. And they were tired of the silly stories, and crummy tickling and bondage. So they moved to the ’tie them up and tickle them’ format. They still supplied an hour of material in general on a tape. This allowed one to really get to know a lee, as you’d see a LOT of them getting tickled. Mary from MTP is still remembered today as this thread shows. And while Jeff wanted to film real girls with real reactions he was also in a location where real girls were all that he really had access to, as did most of the small producers at the time. They hired who they could locally.
The other feature of this period of note is that Real Tickling produced the first new ‘name’ tickling celebrity in Pricilla James. Like the Harmony models before her, Pricilla would prove to be a draw all on her own, and would be a harbinger of things to come in later eras. TC also spoke to the fans desire for better bondage in their media also. They started to show the early device bondages that we’d get to know much better in later times.
As the early 2000’s passed the web moved from dial-up to high speed based. And this changed our industry again. Now media didn’t have to travel through the mail. It could be sent over the web. No physical object was needed. Things were still a bit slow by todays standards, so the concept of the ‘clip’ became the norm. A shorter 8 to 13 minute format that ‘fit’ the download speeds of the day better. So things shifted again.
The clip format was perfect for the ‘tie and tickle’ style that had come into vogue. Stories all but dropped away. Interestingly producers tended to keep to the $1 per minute pricing that the old $60 per hour long tapes featured. But since the clips were smaller, it seemed that prices came down. In reality one got much less, but it was volume packed with the exact sort of tickling you wanted. That is if you liked ‘tie and tickle’.
Freed from a lot of carrying costs that physical production held, the smaller producers now found themselves in a wide open market with almost no entry hurdles. Just about anyone with a camera and a iMac could edit clips and get a CC processor and sell. This led to a battle of differentiation. Or as the trade magazines call it “House style” The end of this era would be marked by dozens of companies coming and going, and everyone trying to build an identity.
It turns out that identity came to be perceived around two factors. Bondage quality, and celebrity Lers.
The late ’00’s turned into the teens and we saw Tickle Abuse, Tickle Intensive, French Tickling, UK Tickling, and Czech Tickling rising to the top of the pack. Each of them featured higher end device bondage, with Tickling Abuse leading the pack, thanks to its founders background in carpentry. TA set the standard in device bondage for tickling and was rewarded. It also developed not one, but two celebrity Lers in Tasha and Brook, and as a bonus several celebrity lees also. Not since the early 90’s were there so many models who had name recognition. Czech repeated this model in Europe. And all of these producers cast as many ‘girl next door’ types as pro models. All of them count draw from big population pools in near cities, and had a lot of casting luck. There was a mix.
But with success also comes saturation. All these producers filled the market. And that is before the dozens of other producers are considered. There was/is no shortage of tickling media out there. So much of it in fact that profitability of the models these companies used started to slip. It was harder. And that fact brought this era to a close and moved us along to the next one. The second factor that added to this change was Clips4Sale which killed the last barrier to entry into the market. No need for a site now! C4S would handle that. This increased the competition and saturation ten fold.
Starting about 2013 or so we entered the era of diversification. Orgasm play was the biggest facet of this. Always close fetish friend of tickling, Forced orgasms were a natural expansion for many companies. Others tried to fill specific sub groups of the fetish, buried in sand clips, super hero tickling, storyline based material (Coming full circle back to the earliest eras) These extra features are often things that a ‘girl-next-door’ model is not down with doing. It’s one thing to get tickled on cam, totally another to get nude and have a few orgasms forced by a hitachi. So the average model moved to the professional girl, who does fetish videos as a living. The environment of what the industry produces became more inline to the average person's mind as porn. And that is a hurdle for talent attraction.
So we find ourselves in an era of plenty. There is no shortage of tickling clips out there. The bigger players are needfully diversified to maintain their market share, which means they are going to cater to multiple aspects of the tickling fetish and close ones (Orgasm, Foot worship, watersports, and some sadism) with an ever changing group of smaller producers that do pure tickling trying to find an audience that is big enough to make things more then a hobby. Which is very very difficult.
How will things change next? What technology or innovation will shift things next, and produce a new leader? It’s hard to know.
What we do know is that none of the previous eras can be revisited. They were all products of their specific times. Unique results of the technology and limits of years past.
Cam-Girls are becoming powerful. The Web-Cam industry has disrupted the old big powerful porn producers. And they are often girls next door too. Lots of tickling happens on MyFreeCams, Chatterbate, and Streammates as easily as tipping a duo that is working together. Perhaps we’ll move to an on-demand live model next. Tickle Intensive or Czech or a totally new name will announce a nightly web stream you can buy entry into, and you’ll tip pre-bought tokens to get the tickling you want. And you can record it yourself too. Insex does this with hardcore S&M now, as does Kink (and people DO request tickling in those live feeds).
The future is rarely what we expect, and it rarely seems as good as what we first experienced when we were discovering this thing that turns us on. Those formative days. But change will keep coming.
Myriads
