This topic contains 14 replies, has 0 voices, and was last updated by 
-
Posts
-
Hi All,
A few years ago I launched a foot fetish glamour site called SilkSoles.com. It was good fun to shoot, but I’d misjudged how incredibly specialised the foot fetish market had already become. (Did you know you can choose from several sites which specialise in crushing fruit underfoot- even to the extent of which sort of fruit and stockings vs tights vs barefoot?) Anyway, it just wasn’t making enough profit to justify the time and energy needed to keep running the site.
So I closed it down as a members’ site and converted it to a a shopping cart site. Of course, I wasn’t shooting new content any more, so eventually the site stagnated and the time has now come to close it down as a separate site.
But… that leaves me with a bit of a dilemma. I have 120-150 foot fetish sets of some of the most beautiful Restrained Elegance models, unbound. It seems a shame for them to be languishing on my hard drive doing nothing, especially as there are some bloody hot sets of some of the all-time fave RE models in there. I’m thinking of running them here on RE as a sort of bonus foot fetish archive. Is that something you’d like to see? I’ve posted a few samples below so you can see the sort of sets I’m talking about.
I have in mind posting them as a kind of “bonus archive” in a separate section. Probably less than one set a day (one a week?) maybe leaving them up permanently once they are posted (depends a bit on the space and bandwidth requirements).
Let me know what you think.
Cheers, Hywel.
Edited By Hywel on 1158065329
You’re a dark horse Hywel, just how many sites do you have a hand in.. 🙂
I guess glamour shots of stunning girls can never be a bad thing but I confess to being completely turned off by the gratuitous foot closeups.
I’d vote for sell or lease the content to a specialist site etc and use your time/bandwidth for other things, but hey – its your baby Hywel..
I doubt CD will be all that interested either.. ahem.. 😀 :notworthy 😀
Cheers
M
Ummmm not that many sites at all!
RestrainedElegance.com – my baby 🙂
JasmineSinclair.com – I help out Jas and do most of the photography.
JasminesBondageTheatre.com – basically a video shopping cart for old clips from RE and JS
EvilMagician.com – I do the video part of the site, Rob McKenna (the Evil Magician himself) does most of the photo part of the site.
PinkBondage.com – I helped Missey get her site online and have shot a few sets for her.
SilkSoles.com – now retired! 🙂
HywelPhillips.com – was supposed to be my photography portfolio site but I haven’t updated it in centuries… I’m not really chasing photo work, I have more than enough on my plate with the sites I have.
Think that’s it… OK maybe it is quite a few!
Hywel.
Hi!
Very nice pictures, unfortunately I am not a foot fetishist at all.
Greetings,
Krot.Ahem!
I doubt CD will be all that interested either.. ahem..
Ah Merlin you have a lot to learn – am way ahead of you. Having been a member here for a while I was of course aware of Silk Soles right back when Hywel launched the site. Unfortunately back then I was a poor student and could not foot (pun get-it?) the bill for both RE and Silk Soles (I also occasionally joined Jasmines site when my drunk mind managed to shout over my sober-prudent one). I did however join just as it was converted from a membership site to an archive one (that kind Hywel offered it at cut price!) so I have many of the sets (that was a fun month on my dial-up!!) but would of course be interested in the earlier ones – and Merlin needs educating on this foot-stuff anyway!!.
CD.
Ps – On the subject of your other sites why doesn’t Jasmines Bondage theater offer the large-screen movies like how they are (these days) offered when first posted? I recently brought a dud batch of CD’s and lost a couple of movies from my archive. Don’t mind buying them (or indeed waiting for them in the archive) but would like them BIG!!.
🙂
There are three reasons why I don’t currently put the large versions of the clips up on Jasmine’s Bondage Theatre.
1) It costs me more. Quite a lot more, in fact- the way the shopping cart is set up, it costs me a flat rate per month of $50 per GB of space I am using, plus an overhead for having the cart system (I don’t, however, pay for the bandwidth used- it is folded into the cost of space on the system). The big videos are so big that the hosting cost would be a big drain. The sales of these videos tend to be a bit of a spike when they first go up, followed by steady but slow sales forever after that. Having a lot of videos sat there which only get a few purchases each month isn’t cost effective if every one is 100+ MB.
2) It keeps something special for members.
3) The videos are not DRM protected. This was something we looked into when we launched but it proved to be so much of a pain in the arse that we dropped it in the end. The large videos on the members’ area are kind-of self limiting. If someone joins for a month and decides to rip me off by selling “DVD’s” of my videos on eBay, at least they only get 100 days’ worth of videos. If the videos on the shopping cart site were high size high resolution, someone could pay a few hundred dollars and have every video I’ve ever made in high resolution, unprotected against copying in any way. That makes me a bit nervous as I don’t want to see any more ripped off versions of my stuff on eBay than I already do. (Funny, eBay and PayPal’s terms and conditions prohibit me selling them openly and honestly myself… but they seem rather uninterested in stamping out the rip-off merchants from doing the same. Bah Humbug!)
When I think that DRM technology has properly matured and everyone finally has broadband, it won’t be too hard to swap everything for the full-resolution versions as of course I have all of them on disk. For videos from about 2004 onwards I even have the full edited DV files on disk too, so I can in principle always re-encode in a new format at the full quality of the original from the camera. In fact I should probably look into the whole question again- but as the shopping cart sales are rather modest compared with the members stuff, I’ve had to concentrate my energies on next month’s updates rather than what to do with all the back catalogue stuff. It would probably involve setting up a completely new way of selling the material, publicising it, maybe re-encoding it, finding a new place to host it and process the payment… it would be more or less a full-time job for someone to make that viable.
So I’m afraid for the moment it is small versions on JBT, or stay as a member and collect them in high res as they come around on the archives. It is actually more cost effective for you to do it that way because membership is pretty damn good value for 1 new set and 1 archive per day- it is only through economies of scale having a reasonable number of members that it works. The prices on JBT and Classic Restrained Elegance on the other hand are set by Visa/MC in effect. They levy fees of 50% and up on small transactions online, so we have to pitch just above that threshold. I don’t have access to clever iTunes-style “queue up the payments to try to batch them together” technology unfortunately (ever wondered why iTunes amalgamates lots of small purchases into one big one a few days later? That’s why!)
So I guess for the moment you’ll have to wait for them to come around again… but I hope that all the new stuff will make the wait worthwhile!!
Cheers, Hywel.
Hi Hywel,
Funny voting so far, considering it is a freebie being offered. a lot of people not wanting it i can’t understand really.
You do run a lot of sites Hywel. respect. :notworthy i did not know you ran http://www.JasmineSinclair.com and also Jasmine’s Bondage Theater site.
I’m not a foot man, but the girls look hot, the outfits look hot….. I’d sure like to see ’em.
p.s
PROPRIETARY DRM IS THE :censored DEVIL!!! :splatI will admit I have been surprised by the thus-far overwhelmingly negative response. It is hardly a big sample of the site membership with far less than one percent responding thus far but even so quite a surprise that people don’t want something for nothing even if it isn’t quite their thing.
Wirewyrm, I wouldn’t be contemplating going down the DRM route if I hadn’t had so many bad experiences with people selling my stuff on eBay for a song. I know that most DRM gets cracked anyway, but at least it is a disincentive. You have no idea how galling it is to see all your own hard work (and cash) sold for next to nothing by some fuck-wit with a DVD drive and a PayPal account. I have to stamp down on it, because the only way to pay next month’s models is by selling last month’s photos and videos 🙁
Hywel.
P.S. it would be wrong to say that I “run” JasmineSinclair.com. JASMINE runs it. I just help out. I do a lot of the photography, but it is all managed and run by Jasmine under her direction (including the photography- I shoot to her brief for what she wants). I used to webmaster for her as well but someone else has taken over most of that side of it now.
Hywel.
Edited By Hywel on 1158330059
@hywel wrote:
a surprise that people don’t want something for nothing even if it isn’t quite their thing.
The “cost” for these sets is bandwidth and your time Hywel. I’d rather see that you are using the time and bandwidth to put up more sets from the archive. That’s why I voted no.
Feet arnt my thing really, but great photography and gorgeous models are so id like to see them, so please put the sets up.
Since the overall feeling was rather negative, I’ve decided not to put the sets up at least for now- I’ve used the storage space to extend the run of archive sets instead. I may put some of the sets up as bonuses in due course, though.
Cheers, Hywel.
Hu? Seems, like I missed this discussion…
Anyways: I agree with most of the other posters here. Nothing comes for free, and if you do this, storage and bandwidth will limit something else.
I am absolutely not into foot fetish, so the probability is quite high that you will come up with something that I am more interested in.
The forum ‘General Chat’ is closed to new topics and replies.