I think the impression is deceptive. There simply are more and more stores opening at Clips4sale, including tickling stores. The competition must be pretty fierce
You have no idea. It's nothing like is was a few years ago, or even just a couple years ago. The market has been fairly saturated for a long time, mind you, but there's been an explosion of new producers in recent times, and it's become ten times worse.
Then there are a few new stores who have so many updates I can hardly keep up, like Charlee, whose material seems quite good, but several others who produce at a terrific rate, but with little regard for quality or even seemingly realistic situations. So i am not surprised that older producers are not able to keep up the sales they once had.
Indeed. Because there are so many new producers and so many new clips, including a few producers who put out new clips like crazy (some of them fairly good, to be fair), some of us get lost in the masses. Also, when a few producers release many clips very quickly and announce them on the forums, it speeds up the thread rotation. So if someone has only one or a few threads announcing new clips (with previews and all), those threads are quickly pushed off the first page by other threads and tend to be quickly forgotten before many people get a chance to notice them. I've had such posts disappear in less than 8 hours after posting them, with very few hits. This means less exposure, which is especially bad when forum posts are pretty much the only advertising that you do, and sales suffer even more.
Another factor that can hurt older vendors is novelty. Some producers remain very popular over a long period of time, but in most cases there can be a relatively brief burts of sale at first because people are curious about the new store, and then later sales go down. New producers appear and, because of the novelty factor, make a lot of sales, while older producers just can't compete anymore because there are so many new players being constantly added to the game.
I can't really complain because I had my own burst of popularity when I first started in 2002. I sold a comparatively incredible number of copies of my first video in the first month. I may even have won the Golden Feather for best new tickling video producer that year, although my memory is a little fuzzy about that and I may be completely wrong. I won't say that things are terrible now, but they're definitely not like they were when I started, and the last year or two have been a totally different game. I have to work a lot harder and release clips a lot quicker than before just to survive. It's pretty scary.
