The rise of clip sites

You may have noticed that there’s more and more clip sites popping up or even cam sites implementing features similar to clip sites. Whether you are you using Clips4sale, which seems to have been around for ever, or newer players like Manyvids or Iwantclips, if you want to make money with your sexy videos, those sites seem unavoidable. There’s a perfect reason for the rise of such sites and here’s my two cents on it…and why you probably should get on it before it gets over saturated like everything else and something new comes along.

State of the Union

First, I’d like to share my humble opinion about the adult industry as I see it. There’s always trends that come and go, new players, old players disappearing,… Change come by necessity or because the industry evolves one way or another. A few years ago came along the tube sites that everybody hated so much. Companies probably disappeared back end, probably spending too much time complaining about the change rather than evolving with it. New tube sites are certainly part of this industry and control probably most of the traffic. I’m not gonna go into the tube site controversy much anyway, I never dwell on the change but rather try to find a way to evolve with it.

One thing is certain, they did change the adult industry. Now, anybody can have access to free porn pretty much anytime, anywhere. That’s where live cams became so popular. And it makes perfectly sense at so many levels. First a live performance can’t really be “stolen”. Of course it can be recorded but it’s not really the same is it? Would you enjoy the Superbowl two days later or would you rather watch it live? And that’s how the webcam era started. The few girls who started at the peak of the trend were highly successful…aka made a lot of money. That’s where everybody wanted a piece of the pie. New cam sites came along, some totally disappeared…RIP CamZ…and a boat load of new camgirls appeared live for everybody to watch.

The cam revolution definitely changed the industry once again. Now pornstars have to share their stardom with the new “camstars”. Or vice versa by the way. Some camgirls took the direction of porn and some became highly successful. The one that came to mind is Nina Elle for example who went from successful camgirl to successful renowned pornstar. But anyway, now you have more and more girls, or guys, or couples, or transgender… so it became harder for everybody to get the piece of the pie they were expecting to get.

The Rise of Clip Sites

That’s where clip sites came along. Early on, camming was not enough to make ends meet so a few sites came along offering other services like phone when a model is not online. But that was not really enough. When you get to watch and hear models live, just a voice over the phone is not that appealing. And on cam there could be hundreds of people watching, asking for ass or boobs or both…so if you wanted to get YOUR fantasy fulfilled you could get a model one on one if the site has that feature…but sites have rules which limited the options if you were into very specific fetishes. That’s where a site like succeeded. People loved to see amateurs doing all kinds of crazy things on camera for them.

And again, everything changed. Revenue from camming was no longer enough so everybody went and produce clips to sell on clips4sale or other similar sites like kinkbomb. Some models took the route of creating their own site and sell memberships with their own content but that option was not cheap. between building a site, processing payments etc…the upfront cost could be detouring. Clip sites became obvious. No upfront cost and you could sell individual clips fulfilling pretty much every single fantasy anybody could have.

Where it started to change is the fact that there were so many porn out there, free or not, that porn started to flinch. Cost of production is high and to compete with free porn it’s really hard for a production company to produce content without knowing how they’re gonna sell it. Which created a “crisis” for the performers having a harder time to get bookings from studios. And anyway performers don’t own the content they are paid to shoot anyway so once they are booked once, they have no way to monetize their own work. That’s where pornstars started to produce their own content as well. And the price of the equipment getting very low, everybody now can be a “producer” with a couple of hundred dollars camera. Suddenly it becomes more profitable for a successful pornstar to sell a $15 clip 100 times than wait for a booking for a couple of $100s.

The battle of the Clip Sites

Now it’s not only clips4sale but you have Manyvids and now Iwantclips battling to get their piece of the pie with that new trend. And not only that but now cam sites are getting in on the game too. MFC Share is a good example. But other sites are offering the ability for their cam models to upload and sell clips as well. What’s gonna be next? Who’s gonna survive the clip trend? That’s an interesting question. Clips4sale is getting old and outdated and they probably lots of lot of market share on this battle. What probably saves them is the very nichy content they offer, although Iwantclips seems to be competing in that realm as well.