I am getting asked why my movies cost more on Clips4Sale than they used to do on Files Forever (yes, I have started thinking about it in the past tense). The reasons are twofold.
1) When a movie is posted on Clips4Sale and a producer clicks on the button to set the price, a list of price options appears. For clips shorter than about 18-20 minutes, the minimum price is pre-set. For example, a 16-minute video cannot be sold for less than $11.99, and a 4-minutes video cannot be sold for less than $4.99, and so on. As the videos get longer, say 30 minutes, the producer has a lot more control over the minimum price (although there is still a cutoff below which one cannot go), meaning that prices can be made more reasonable. However, this brings me to the second reason.
2) Clips4Sale takes a 40% cut of the sale, whereas Dreamhost's Files Forever would take between 18% and 25%, the exact value determined by the size of the file. I therefore cannot make longer movies ridiculously cheap or I will make a loss, and if that happens, the number of shoots and variety of models will both decline sharply. I can (and do) sell movie sets at a price almost the same as before, but it means that I take a hit of $3-4 per sale. If I charge $25 for a set I only receive $15 of that. Considering the overheads of producing these videos, that is not great.
I'll be as fair with you as I can, but at the same time if you want B2B to continue, you'll have to suck up the price difference. Given that all "porn" sites that allow the distribution of adult movies take a similar cut of the action, I suspect prices will be much the same everywhere. I think we've all been spoiled by Files Forever and we'll now have to re-enter the real world. Unless they fix FF... hmm. Anyone see any flying pigs?