Blue-Scion wrote:Well ill do my best to pitch in when i can. Also why is it hard to find credit card merchant accounts? I would have thought that as long as the product is legally obtained and legally sold it would not be an issue. Thats bs if its based on their opinion of the content. Just for some context. Is this a new issue or one that has been around a while? Also are investors hard to find? Sorry for the basic questions but i just am not familiar with that side of things is all.
No problem. Ask away. Here are the answers:
1. I've been doing this business for about 12 years and over that period of time it has gotten harder and harder to get credit card merchant accounts. I know that all of the porn sites seem to have them, but usually that's because they are using off-shore credit card suppliers who are not very trustworthy with your money. I have lost thousands of dollars overnight by trying out these fly-by-night secondary credit card suppliers. The stable credit card suppliers simply do not like our type of material and they are big enough that they do not need it. Yes, it is censorship plain and simple, and it is right from the top, i.e. Visa and Mastercard. They use the excuse that they don't want to damage their brand by being associated with this community's type of material.
2. As for investors, when I was exclusively doing my low budget crime video business, I would shoot about 4 videos a day. The quality was not the greatest, but the fetish elements were there, and I could break even with a combination of regular sales and custom work. I would do customs for people in the range of $800 to $1,500, depending on the complexity of the custom script. Fast forward to the Bluestone Superheroine series. In order to challenge myself and provide a product that was equal or better to anything in this marketplace, I aimed for TV quality material and hired a full crew for the first time. The talent, the acting, the editing, the effects, the stunts... everything was top quality. The result was that one video now takes an average of two days to film, but the videos do not sell for 8 times what my crime videos retail at. I can't very well sell these videos for over $100 each. Secondly, if I was selling customs at the same proportionate rate, in two days I should be able to sell customs worth 8 X $800 to $1,500, i.e. a total of $6,400 to $12,000 for that one two day custom. Unfortunately, there are very few people who can afford that type of cash... thus, the crowd funding initiative. Since there are very few, if any, investors who can afford a custom of the Bluestone Superheroine quality, crowd funding is the only reasonable and viable option.
I hope that helps to better flesh out those two issues for you.
Blue