Category Archives: HywelPhillips.com

Server moves on the way

A Hive of Activity?

When things go quiet, it is usually because we’re in a frenzy of behind-the-scenes activity which will make its way to the screen for you soon. Here’s a “state of the fetish empire” update.

At the end of 2013, Ariel and I did a shoot with the lovely Sophia Smith on location in the Welsh borders. After the shoot, we both independently said how much we’d liked the shoot, but also how much we’d liked the area.

We currently live in the South East of England, quite close to London. We moved here for work, but in my case the job was a lectureship which I quit a decade ago. The south east is very crowded and rather expensive.

We vaguely mused that we might consider a move in a year or two, and planned to spend a few days at the end of February scouting out quieter areas of the country where we might be able to get a little more for our money house-wise. When your house is your photo-studio, space becomes an all-consuming demand: more rooms means more potential sets and more places to store the mountain of clothes, bondage gear, lights and camera gear that our two businesses require.

Somehow “consider moving in a year or two” became “let’s look on Rightmove” which became “Let’s put our house on the market” which became “moving house in a couple of months”, assuming everything goes OK. So our scouting trip at the end of February has morphed into a second viewing of the house we are hoping to buy. We’re very excited- I don’t want to say any more publicly because we superstitiously don’t want to jinx the whole thing!

Needless to say, this has meant January was whirlwind of stuff to do, not helped by the fact that I was called for Jury service potentially taking me out for two weeks at the start of February. (In fact I ended up showing up for two days, not being drawn to serve on the jury twice, and being told I could go. I was actually quite disappointed, there’s nothing I like more than learning new things and I was interested to see the justice system at work).

We’ve been hard at work processing photosets and editing videos to make sure we have enough stuff queued up to cope with a potential house move, and now we’re getting back into shoots for the spring shooting season. Our first shoot of the year was with stunning new model Fiona Jane:

We’ve got more shoots with new models coming up in the next few weeks, and one or two with fave models to make sure we have enough sets of them to carry us through and make sure we don’t have a panic if timescales slip on the house move.

We also took the opportunity to do a few sets with just Ariel and me, which is something we really must make more time for. Poor Ariel has been very brave stepping up to rigging for the site and it was nice to get her back on the right side of the rope!

We’ve also been frantically editing videos we shot before Xmas. The two best-fun shoots were a big RE reunion location shoot with Steve, Merlin, Kate, Katy, Ariel, Hywel and Natalia Forrest, and a weekend shoot with Ariel, Hannah Claydon and Janey.

The first thing we shot that week was a thrilling new historical epic for Elegance Studios, called Highwayman. I’ve finally had chance to do a rough cut of that:

As often happens with Elegance Studios, editing the rough cut showed up that we didn’t really have all the footage we needed to tell the story properly. I guess it is just hard to fit shooting a 30+ minute feature indie-film style into a single day! So we’re going to have to pick up some extra scenes the next time we have Ariel and Natalia together- hopefully a very early shoot at the new house, since it should fit in quite well with the look of the footage we shot on location last year.

We’ve got another proto-Elegance-Studios film in the works which we started just before Xmas at an action-packed weekend shoot with three of the models who I think are really superb, natural actresses: Ariel, Hannah Claydon and Janey. It was the first time in a couple of years we’d managed to schedule a shoot with Janey and it was absolutely wonderful to catch up and see her do her stuff again!

The long video we started on is a sexy spy thriller with a seventies twist called “The Island of Doctor Destructo” (think The Prisoner with a hint of Stepford Wives). I haven’t had chance to put together a rough cut yet, as usual I suspect we might want to add a few scenes once I’ve seen it cut together, but here are a couple of framegrabs of raw ungraded footage as a teaser:

What about the other sites?

As you’ll probably have seen if you’ve checked out Restrained Elegance our idea of a world where being a nude in metal girl was a fashion and lifestyle choice like being a goth or a hippy has found a great home as a new special feature. We had considered launching this as a separate website and I guess if it is really, really popular we still might at some point in the future. But overall it seems much more at home on Restrained Elegance and we’re very happy with it there. It is great fun to shoot, so we’re looking forward to expanding the world and the ideas soon.

Bastinado Girls is sadly on indefinite hold. We had some of the best times ever shooting for it, but as Ariel explained in her blog, she suffered an injury last year from which she is yet to fully recover. As the problem is her knee but with complications including pain in her foot, we’re just not going to risk bastinado until she’s better. No amount of sexy fun is ever worth putting your partner at risk so we want to be sensible.

We do have a little fun project to fill in the gap with just Ariel and me shooting together, but that’s at too early a stage to say anything about it yet.

The British Film Festival idea is also on hold. The film producers we got together are still keen to organise something, but we’re thinking more along the lines of a film-makers skill-sharing event than a public screening at the moment. We’ll hopefully organise this if and when we move house (it doesn’t make any sense to plough through the bureaucracy in the South East if we’re about to move away).

Last but not least is Silk Soles which is very close to my heart but which I knew was something of a self-indulgence when we started it. I have a foot fetish, and Silk Soles is what I like when the girl isn’t tied up (or isn’t tied up YET, if I am more honest with myself!)

When we launched Silk Soles , we decided to give it a year and see if it was commercially viable. It wasn’t a great time to be launching a new site- most webmasters I know were still in decline, despite the economy at large starting to pick up. The year is almost up and it is getting towards crunch time- in the next couple of months we’re going to have to decide whether to book more shoots and shoot more sets with new models.

Frankly, Silk Soles has not yet broken even.

It’s a terrible dilemma.

We have a band of faithful members who say it is just the very best foot fetish site they’ve ever seen and they love it to bits. One member said he loved the way the videos are like frozen moments, the thrill of seeing a girl’s bare soles the first time and the breathless anticipation of seeing her naked. It’s probably too gentle and innocent for today’s foot fetish porn market, but there are still some people who can see the romance and the eroticism… and for some of those people it is just the ticket.

Ariel and I love shooting for it- it feels so fluid compared with bondage shoots, and the knowledge that the audience is small but dedicated has allowed us to experiment with things a bit more freely than we might for RE, which remains the cornerstone of the “Empire” (and the thing which pays the bills). That artistic freedom leads to fun new ways to shoot, which feeds back into the bread-and-butter shoots for RE. We really appreciate having side projects to stretch us a bit, we think it is important for helping us stay fresh.

We thought we could shoot in a quicker and less painstaking style for Silk Soles than we do for RE. It turns out we can’t. More specifically, I can’t bring myself to produce work to a lower standard than that of which I know I am capable. So initial plans to shoot stills and video using the same lighting went out the window, and as a result Silk Soles sets take very nearly as long to film as RE shoots do… and the membership as yet doesn’t justify it.

But… damn it, we really enjoy it, and the membership HAS been growing for the last few months.

I should emphasise that if we do stop updating we’ll make sure everyone gets all the updates they paid for- we work far enough ahead that we’ll notify everyone in good time that the updates will stop on whatever date and everyone will get their month’s worth of updates at the very least. It’s not going to suddenly stop. What we’re talking about is deciding whether to launch into another round of shoots in the knowledge that we may not make our money back soon, or possibly ever.

But it really brought home how much we enjoy it just recently when Ariel and I shot a batch of videos for Silk Soles:

I guess what we may do is to carry on the pattern we’ve recently established of having every other update feature Ariel for SilkSoles: that way we cut the costs of the shoot (since I pay Ariel, but obviously that money stays in our household so we can still use it to pay our bills and mortgage!)

I wonder what SilkSoles members think of that idea? I happen to think Ariel has very pretty feet and personally I’d be delighted with a site that was 50% Ariel… obviously still featuring all the other regulars like Natalia, Tillie, Hannah Claydon, Anita deBauch and the other RE girls as they come for their shoots with us.

What do you think?

How paysites work

9 Replies

Download restrictions, rolling archives, high prices, no ZIP files, no full-sized versions, recurring billing, adverts, banner links, forests of TGP sites leading to more sites… sometimes it seems like adult paysites are a minefield of restrictions and attempts to squeeze dollars from you.

Why can’t they just give us good stuff at affordable prices? Why does it have to be so complicated? Here’s my attempt to explain why.

I know I’ve gone on about this a fair bit recently: sorry. I just read a bunch of quite mean-spirited comments about websites on an adult review site and I don’t think the posters really have any idea of why things run this way in website land. It isn’t webmasters being penny-pinching misers sipping champagne in their chateaux. It’s inescapable market forces acting on a whole bunch of small cottage industry producers (especially in specialist niches like bondage and foot fetish).

It takes time, energy and effort to create erotic photos and videos and share them online.

Even the humblest selfie takes a bit of time. No model wants to appear in a picture looking crap, so assume that they’ve done their makeup, found something nice to wear, practiced the pose in the mirror a few times. Then it takes a few seconds to actually shoot.

Then you have to upload to a website, maybe with a bit of editing (even if it is only resizing). You have to spend a little time letting people know it exists, even if that’s only uploading to Facebook, Twitter and Fetlife.

Bandwidth isn’t free- someone has to pay the data carriers whenever that gets downloaded. It could be paid for by the person hosting the site, or by adverts on their site, or by the person downloading… either in cash, or in data collected on you that can be sold to advertisers.

If you launch a little website that’s at all appealing to people, you will rapidly discover that the appetite for free downloads is very large- and the accompanying bandwidth bill from your hosting company can be a real shock to the system, assuming they haven’t cut you off already.

EVERYTHING you see on the web is paid for by somebody, somewhere, in money or in their time. If you aren’t paying for it directly you are paying for it indirectly because they are selling your details and your clicks to people who might persuade you to pay for it.

This isn’t necessarily sinister- it’s just a bit more personal than forcing you to watch advert breaks on TV. But bear in mind that if the service is free, the service isn’t the product the company is selling and you aren’t their customer. The product the company is selling is access to you, and their customers are advertisers and anyone else they think might be able to make a buck from you. That’s why Twitter has just introduced pictures in your timeline without clicking – it paves the way for automatic display of pretty paid adverts.

The main costs of running an adult website are:

Content

Models
Locations
Clothes, shoes, etc.. Bondage Gear, ropes and chains in our case, too.
Travel, catering, heating, power and other expenses for shoot days

Editing. It typically takes at least as long to get photos and videos into a suitable form for posting to a website as it does to shoot it in the first place. Someone has to do that, so you either pay someone, or do it yourself and hope to pay yourself from profits.
Infrastructure and Equipment. You can’t shoot without a camera, lights, maybe a microphone, memory cards, hard drives to back up to, and reasonably powerful computers to edit everything on. (A five year old laptop won’t cut it, modern digital cameras just generate too much data for that).
Web design. You can get content management systems open-source, but someone has to configure them, do the pretty graphics to make it all look appealing, and do the data entry every time you upload a set
Web hosting. If you are charging people, they expect the site to be up, always. That means patches, data managers, backups, system administrators, data centres… that’s not free.
Bandwidth. This is the other biggie. People are very interested in free erotica: tens of thousands of people might download every free sample you post. When people join they want to download everything of interest to them, of course. The final bill for this can be thousands of dollars a month.
Letting people know you exist. Posting free previews, doing link exchanges, getting on other websites, Google Adwords, social networking… just getting people to know you exist at all takes a lot of time and hard work.

To a first approximation, Content, Editing, Equipment and Web Design are fixed costs. It doesn’t matter if you have one member or one thousand- you still need camera, model, computer, website. (Although in practice the content is likely to be much nicer if you’ve got lots of lovely members helping pay for it).

Web hosting and bandwidth are marginal costs, add more visitors and members and the costs will go up.

Advertising could be either- for example, a lot of websites run affiliate schemes which pay out to the webmaster who send the customer to the site (marginal cost) but also pay to run ads on Fetlife (fixed cost).

Most websites in a niche like bondage have a few hundred members at any one time. The very biggest probably only have a few thousand. Put that in context- a typical Hollywood movie might well be seen by millions of people. They can spread their costs between many, many more people. That’s why a DVD of Robocop might cost £10 where a DVD of an erotic movie might cost £30 and have much lower production value for your money. There’s a far smaller group of people kicking in a few bucks to make the bondage DVD.

It’s worth saying that again. If you pay for something you like, you are one of a small group of people paying to make it.

The only way this stuff gets made at all is because some people are willing to pay for it.

Either to pay to watch it, or possibly pay to do it (at much greater expense, but with resultant complete control over what they make because they are doing it for themselves, then possibly sharing because it makes them feel nice).

It is super easy to make niche erotica and make a loss.

It’s easy to spend £1000 on a shoot day- two models and a nice location will do it. Be a little less efficient that you could be and you might end up with less than a week’s worth of updates from such a day. There’s a limit to how much you can shoot in a day- for bondage, it takes time to tie someone up neatly and tidily, then more time to shoot the photos or videos, then untie them.

It’s easy to get your business model wrong and give away too much free stuff, and be faced with thousands in unexpected bandwidth charges.

It’s easy to spend too long editing a set or video you particularly love and realise that your pay rate per hour has plummeted to a quarter of minimum wage.

It’s easy to keep all the content you’ve ever shot up on the website, and discover that someone can join, download everything with a download manager, and cost you $500 in bandwidth charges in exchange for a $19.95 membership fee.

It’s easy to fool yourself that you’ll make more money if you buy a snazzy new camera and some new bondage gear.

And it is super easy to produce stunning material and not have a clue how to get people to look it, let alone pay for it.

Every niche website is walking a tight-rope across these pitfalls. The choices they make to avoid the chasms of blowing a ton of money and never getting it back explain where some of the apparently-strange website habits come from.

Why are recurring memberships cheaper than one-off memberships?

It is just a rip-off right? I want to join and see everything then go away. Why should I pay more?

Think about what your bandwidth usage is likely to be. In month one, you’ll probably have a good long look through the back catalogue and download lots of things which interest you. In month two, you might explore the back catalogue a little more, but most likely you’ll just download the new stuff. In other words, your first month’s membership is likely to run up bigger bills for the website than subsequent months. So websites try to cover their costs, and give you an incentive to stick around, too.

Why don’t websites leave everything up forever?

Same reason. The more material there is up, the more bandwidth charges you can potentially suck up in month one. If that gets too much bigger than your membership fee, the webmaster will plummet down the chasm of making a loss on your membership… and will go out of business, sooner or later.

In fact it is even worse than that. If all the content stays up forever, you can join once, download everything, go away for five years, come back and hoover up five new years of content. In effect, you’ve decided not to pay anything towards shooting that content- your membership fee will probably barely cover the bandwidth charges for such a big download.

What about daily download limits? I’ve got a fast connection, why can’t I download it all now?

Same reason. The bandwidth limit will be set to ensure that the website doesn’t lose money on your signup. It has to be, or the website will soon be gone.

What about all those annoying advert-laden sites?

It’s another way to cover some of the website’s costs. If you are interested in the theme of the site but won’t spend money there. Maybe you have a policy of NEVER joining paysites… but maybe you do bondage in your real life. Perhaps a bondage gear shop might tempt you to spend money. They’ll kick back something to the original website or pay per click they send them. This business model works for Google, by the way 🙂

What about badly-designed websites? What’s the excuse for that?

You may not know it, but most fetish websites are run by one or two people. If they aren’t good at graphic design and website layout, they’re probably trying to scrape together a site without any expert input. These days we’re used to slick commercial sites like eBay, Apple, Amazon, etc.. They were clunky as hell in the early days, too, but with the vastly higher customer numbers of mainstream business, they can afford teams of professional designers and programmers to make their sites so cool.

Actually, it is amazing how well HTML and CSS have been designed, because even amateurs can put together really nice functional sites. It’s surprising that more sites don’t look like they are stuck in 2001.

There’s also another reason. Bad design like not providing stills in ZIP files and having awkward, multiple mouse click navigation is that it slows your browsing down, which cuts down their bandwidth bill. It’s just another way to walk the tightrope of avoiding making a loss.

Our choices

We based our choices for our websites on what we like ourselves as customers. I don’t join erotic sites as often now I make my own, but I am at heart a paysite customer.

I shoot the content I was looking for- bare foot, bondage, colourful, kinda clean, a mix of metal and rope bondage, the prettiest models I can find and the nicest locations I can afford. We try to be as efficient as we can without compromising on quality.

I hate download limits, because I’m busy. I’m more likely to use my entire download allocation in one go, then look at the stuff I’ve downloaded later. So I try to make it easy to do that, with ZIP file links right there on the index pages.

The corollary is that if we have no download limits or speed limits, we CANNOT leave all the content up permanently. So I’ve set the amount of content so that if you download all of it in one go in the first month, I at least avoid making a loss. That’s why we have a rolling archive and sets stay up for a certain length of time on the members’ area, not forever.

As I’ve said before, personally I prefer that. I think it draws sets to my attention that I might never have noticed languishing on page 117 of dusty old updates and makes everything feel more lively. It’s like getting a random back issue free with each month’s new edition of a magazine.

I’ve tried to make the design as clean and easy and pretty as I can, within the limits of my skill and my abilities as a graphics designer. My University friend Ian has helped out a lot behind the scenes developing the content management system which runs the site (when we started there were no open source projects like Joomla or WordPress to use). The site could do with a freshen up… it’s on my to-do list once I’ve processed January’s updates, and done December’s shoots, and answered all the emails.

It is a minor miracle of the Internet age that it is possible to purchase erotica that twenty years ago would have been either unobtainable or twenty times the price. (Just look at the number of photos in a typical men’s mag vs the number you get on a typical website in a month if you don’t believe me). It is only possible to do by spreading the costs out amongst everyone who would like to see the material. So if you see a site you like, please join it. At least for a month. Maybe two. That way, it’ll still be there in a few years’ time, the next time you’re having a look around 🙂 🙂 🙂

Cheers, Hywel

Forum Move (Soon, Hopefully)

In Defence of Democracy

2 Replies

Hi All,

Brief diversion from the kinky fun. In recent weeks there have been some high-profile “Don’t vote”/”Vote”/”Vote Labour” debates flying across cyberspace in the UK following a good old rant from Russell Brand as guest editor of the New Statesman saying “I will never vote and I don’t think you should either”.

Robert Webb retorted that you should (and he suggested voting labour).

I think people should vote too, but not because one lot of our current politicians are particularly better than another. If there’s no-one worth voting for, stand yourself.

I think you should vote because democracy is the least-worst system we have ever managed to come up with for how to organise ourselves as a society.

Democracy is the only system where you can entirely change every last little detail of how the country you live in is run… if only you can persuade enough people that it is a good idea to do so.

Let’s think about that for a moment. In the sort of revolution Brand seems to be tacitly suggesting we undertake, you don’t persuade people. Historically, you shoot them. It hasn’t worked out so well when it has been tried in the past, unless the revolution is used to put in place a democracy.

Russell Brand, I hear what you are saying, and I agree with some of it. But to say that the thing that is broken is the very mechanism of peaceful, one-person-one-vote decision making? There I think you are dangerously, dangerously wrong.

It may well be that the current crop of choice on the ballot papers are an indistinguishable omnishambles. That means we need higher quality people with higher quality plans for which we can vote.

All one has to do to change the way the country is run, from top to bottom, is to come up with a good suggestion for how to do it, then persuade people how good an idea it actually is.

That’s all. Not shoot them, bribe them, torture them, imprison them, rob them, run them out of the country, threaten them. Just persuade them that it is a good idea. Then they’ll vote for the idea, or at least indirectly vote for it by voting for people who can implement it. Admittedly you will need to find a few hundred trustworthy people to be in charge of implementing the idea as MP’s. If the idea is that good, surely it will attract enough people willing to work to put it into action?

Organising millions and million of human beings so they can live in close proximity to each other isn’t easy. Our current crop of politicians do seem to be a bit of a shower. But for heaven’s sake let’s not confuse those clowns currently standing with the basic issue of how we decide to organise ourselves.

We can do that by talking, deciding and taking a show of hands. (Democracy).

Or we can do what else, exactly?

Democracy is the one place where my vote really does count the same as everyone else’s. Even with imperfections like a first past the post voting system with constituencies. It doesn’t matter how rich or how ancient the bloodline, one person means one vote and that’s all they get.

By all means, choose not to vote for any of the current bunch. Stand yourself, or find someone you trust and convince them to stand instead. Propose ways of making a more equitable division of our society’s resources. If they’re good ideas, people might actually vote for them.

But say you will NEVER vote, and no-one else should either? How exactly do you propose we make decisions as a society?

EleganceStudios.com : HywelPhillips.com

Cinematography – Photography – Fetish Fashion