Custom Content versus Leased Content

As a content supplier it's in my best interest to tout the benefits of leasing content, versus the often costly (often not resulting in exactly what you want...) process of having custom content shot for your members area...but how do you fell about this perennially debated subject?

What are your thoughts as webmasters sending traffic to a program that has either of these, and which are your preferences to see in a program you support?

Also as paysites owners, what are your preferences...

And maybe we will hear from some program owners who have their own thoughts on the subject....

there is a market for both

Allan i would say personally i tend to lean more towards custom content however with that said, leased content shouldnt be cast aside either.

Both have their own unique selling points when it comes to paysite members areas and, although it may cost you more to have custom content imho this should be the sort of content paysites should primarily seek out, especially in todays volatile marketplace.

However, as said there is also a place inside paysites members areas for leased content afterall, if the leased feed, gallery, game or video provider has built thei name in a specific sector of the adult industry much like Chi Chi Larue has done then it adds an overall feel of 'quality' to a members area however, there are also drawbacks of each type of content to.

Whilst exclusive content can in many instance be costly (even though i know your costs are VERY reasonable ;) ) a lot of the 'new' webmasters launching thei own paysites simply wont be able to go exclusive for months or even years however, on the other hand, filling your members areas with nothing but plug ins can also be a major turn-off to a surfer joining a site, why should they join your site if they can find everything you have and more at one of your competitors.

IMHO a even mixture of exclusive custom content and leased content i the way to go whilst ensuring the you also have enough 'filler' content to hold the members once their trial has passed :)

Regards,

Lee

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Originally posted by Lee
Allan i would say personally i tend to lean more towards custom content however with that said, leased content shouldnt be cast aside either.

Both have their own unique selling points when it comes to paysite members areas and, although it may cost you more to have custom content imho this should be the sort of content paysites should primarily seek out, especially in todays volatile marketplace.

However, as said there is also a place inside paysites members areas for leased content afterall, if the leased feed, gallery, game or video provider has built thei name in a specific sector of the adult industry much like Chi Chi Larue has done then it adds an overall feel of 'quality' to a members area however, there are also drawbacks of each type of content to.

Whilst exclusive content can in many instance be costly (even though i know your costs are VERY reasonable ;) ) a lot of the 'new' webmasters launching thei own paysites simply wont be able to go exclusive for months or even years however, on the other hand, filling your members areas with nothing but plug ins can also be a major turn-off to a surfer joining a site, why should they join your site if they can find everything you have and more at one of your competitors.

IMHO a even mixture of exclusive custom content and leased content i the way to go whilst ensuring the you also have enough 'filler' content to hold the members once their trial has passed :)

Regards,

Lee

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Good post Lee, I agree with what you're saying. I think custom content surely has it's place, and when clients ask me I advise them to use custom content for tour design and updates and use leased content for member's area filler.

Then there's avs sites.. custom is good for tours on avs sites and in the member's area the same way as you'd use it for a paysite.

Freesites, it's good to use leased content for these especially when you're targeting search engines with thousands of sites (this is where I get all of my best traffic from)

Freesites that you want to submit to link lists or tgp, either custom content or leased content that's not overused.

both very good points.

Another thought is how about buying DVD content for exclusive rights, and using that content in your members area?

Well I can tell you that i used to sell plugins (leased content) and now i sell Scenes that the webmasters can stream themselves.

I couldn't sell plugins to save my life but since i started selling licenses to content my sales have been amazing. Plus leased content is rarely updated in my experience and they also don't offer the following bennefits like worldwidecontent.com does


*** You can watermark the content with the name of your site.
*** You can offer 10(sec)clips as promo to your webmasters.
*** Each scene is less then 3 month old to the Internet
*** Each scene will be NOT be sold more the 15 times
*** Each scene comes with 20 pictures (TGP Ready)
*** Each scene comes with 10 - 10 second clips
*** Each scene was produced less then on year
*** Semi Exclusive Content NOT Plugins
*** Each scene is 20 min. long

At the end of the day buying licenses adds equity to your business and leased content DOES NOT

when i think of leased galleries i think of all these crappy pay sites made out of brocker content that's available from the nearest TGP.

there's some good stuff though like Squirtz.com for example

Jigg i have to agree with you on the Squirtz feed it seems to deliver what it promises for sure :)

However i have also seen some of Allens content and have to admit that looks pretty good too :thumbsup:

Regards,

Lee

leased content VERY rarely has the same look and feel as content you host in your paysite - whether exclusive or non. also a lot of plugins have crappy interfaces and graphics.

if i have non exclusive content in my site, i'd rather pay for it once instead of monthly. we've been moving toward putting all the content on our server, bit by bit, and losing the lease stuff. well, we'll probably keep aebn ;-)

we got some content from worldwidecontent. the license says you can only use the videos - except for the 10 second clips they provide - in the member area. i like that idea, and hopefully that will keep the content a little fresher.

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Originally posted by basschick
the license says you can only use the videos - except for the 10 second clips they provide - in the member area. i like that idea, and hopefully that will keep the content a little fresher.

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You see th problem that i see with that though speaking purely from my own experiences with providers that issue similar types of licenses is that EVERY affiliate / paysite owner starts thinking the same thing and pretty soon you have even more content that would be no better than a plug in feed.

Regards,

Lee

i've definitely experienced that, but worldwidecontent says they only license each scene 10 times. i guess you could call it semi-exclusive.

are there other providers that license each video a limited number of times?

Im not sure if they still do with the new ownership but i beleive Fetish Brokers used to do that too.

I have also seen a few spam posts on other boards along the same lines too but honesty dont recall who the providers were :(

Regards,

Lee

check out our Treys Top Tips product, and let me know what you think of our leased content. I do agree that in some circumstances some less than honourable companies don't update their content...and that sucks. But there are alwasy those that do, and do it regularly, sch as us.

OUr product is updates 4 times a month, for our leased feed clients, AND we have our host answer emails from their members...as well as do the odd message to the fans in response to particularly interesting comments from viewers, wherever the source. That is beyond the realm of budget constraints for most smaller operations, yet we deliver it for only a few hundred bucks a month......

now tell me there isn't a place for leased content, if its done well. All of our content is fresh, well thought out, and we have our clinets members in mind when we shoot episode updates. I strongly believe that is the future of leased content.

www.msquaredproductions.com go to demo, and the u/p is mspdemo/retention. scroll down to Treys Top Tips, and let me honestly know what you guys think.

thanks, and thanks for the feed back so far.

here are the problems i see with trey's top tips. first off, it's obvious that the surfer has left our site - the colors won't match, the headers won't match, the home link doesn't go to our home page.

second, the page layout is not very attractive. it's dark, cumbersome and some of the content only comes in wmv. my stats show that more of my surfers prefer mpg over other formats, so we give them wmv and mpg as a choice, in broadband and dialup. we give them clips and a full length. the paragraphs are huge without a break, and are taller than the graphics next to them.

all in all, to us lease this content, a designer would have to redo the layout and text entirely. then we'd consider it... but even so, if a guy joined another site, saw your content, then joined mine - he's going to see the EXACT same pages.

there is one lease content company that allows us to link to each video separately, and to configure the pages so they use our header and colors. also using templates, we can make our layout for the content different from any other site's. that is the only kind of lease content i consider would be a viable replacement for content we serve from our own server.

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Originally posted by basschick
here are the problems i see with trey's top tips. first off, it's obvious that the surfer has left our site - the colors won't match, the headers won't match, the home link doesn't go to our home page.

second, the page layout is not very attractive. it's dark, cumbersome and some of the content only comes in wmv. my stats show that more of my surfers prefer mpg over other formats, so we give them wmv and mpg as a choice, in broadband and dialup. we give them clips and a full length. the paragraphs are huge without a break, and are taller than the graphics next to them.

all in all, to us lease this content, a designer would have to redo the layout and text entirely. then we'd consider it... but even so, if a guy joined another site, saw your content, then joined mine - he's going to see the EXACT same pages.

there is one lease content company that allows us to link to each video separately, and to configure the pages so they use our header and colors. also using templates, we can make our layout for the content different from any other site's. that is the only kind of lease content i consider would be a viable replacement for content we serve from our own server.

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thanks for your comments. I would like to just add a couple of retorts, if thats cool. You did just enjoy the demo section of our content region, not the supply area which has wmv, quicktime, high and low speed, broadband and dial up. All supplied in mpeg 4.
The site delivery is also in redesign...giving you better ability to supply your surfers. In the near future we will be able to give you the choice to atailor our content to your requirements in terms of templates and colour schemes.

unfortunately, this is what i am always told - our member area will be better looking soon. i have never seen a plugin company hire the same designers who do paysite member areas - and have something comparable made...

how about dickmans deisgn?

i like their work, although they have a tendancy to overcomplicate. do they have many member templates to their credit that weren't changed after they were put in the member areas?

either way, they will work with what you tell them. so it really depends on how much you know about member areas.

sorry basschick, but i just checked out your home page. I like my design better than yours. lol.

I have a few problems with leased content that may help you out.

First of all, I come from the school of thinking that if you want to produce good gay content you better be doing the deed on a regular basis yourself. If not, then you probably don't really know what gay men are looking for.

Take for instance a lot of the picture sets that come out of eastern Europe (not Higgins and Bel Ami) you get 160 pictures of a straight naked guy sitting on a couch looking dazed and confused. Not very thrilling for me or my surfers.

So if you want to sell gay content to the gay market and you're not gay, you'd better hire a gay person to look at your stuff and tell you how to make it better.

Putting a guy in a t-shirt that says "Army" on the front does not make it a military set. Bears weigh more than 160 and have more than 12 hairs on their chest.

And this is the reason why I never really considered buying a lot of leased content. It's thrown together by companies who don't really care about the niche they're promoting.

The other big problem I have with content is duplication. Randy Blue has great content on their paysite and I'm doing well promoting it. But there are so many people now using their hosted galleries that eventually it'll be time to find a new sponsor because it's been free-hosted and TGP'd to death. It's reached over-saturation portions. And then, once it goes through that cycle, it looks like a lot of that content finds it's way over to Max Pixels. And then, I just purchased some stuff from Club Xstream which I'm finding was all available from Max Pixels.

This pisses me off. It might be great for the producer of content because they're selling their stuff, but for me the lone webmaster with a maxed out credit card, I'm pissed that I spent $100 on a CD that was billed as one thing but was really something else.

So, I'd be careful about allowing your stuff to be repackaged and resold.

The problem I have with feeds is again this repackaging and reselling. Or changing the name of a feed, but not changing the content. There's one particular house that I've seen a number of feeds from and it's all the same guys.

I'm also tired of staring at an empty chair or bed. So if you've got leased "live" content, then please make sure your guys are doing what they're supposed to be doing.

The one thing that I would recommend to any producer of content is to pick a niche and do it well. I buy a lot of content from Gay Adult Photos because they do the leather, fisting, real men and barebacking niches very well. They're starting to get into the eastern Euro market, too. But I caution a content provider of trying to go too broad or of getting too greedy.

Become the best damned content producer of gay Asian content. Get that market down before you move on to another niche. Unless you have a staff of hundreds, you can't produce everything and do it well. When I'm looking for leather and hairy men, I check Gay Adult Photos first because they know what they're doing and the content is good. If I don't find what I need there, then I go to Ounique. If I don't find it there, I give up because it pretty much doesn't exist.

I would never purchased leased still picture galleries because I don't want the content provider to suddenly yank the chain on me one day and suddenly I'm stuck trying to figure out how to fill 80 galleries that I've put up on my bear content.

I know this is pretty much a rant, and I know a lot of it doesn't pertain to leased galleries per se, but hopefully it'll help you perfect your product.

Cheers
Dzinerbear

great comments dzinerbear. Thank you...

and our main host and performet for this product (Treys Top Tips) is a bisexual, who just married his long time boyfriend.

So the look and feel is most definately gay. Some of the episodes include "how to bed a married man", "how to maximise a threesome" and the infamous" How to jack off with a banana".

Not exactaly your run of the mill sit in a chair and whack off content.

which has exactly nothing to do with whether your member content will help my paysite member area. that is the concern of this thread.

i COULD point out that we are not actively working the site you looked at, or that THIS is our new layout when we are working it again:

http://nichesitesgold.com/flash/indexwithflash.htm

but ultimately i don't understand why my comments about MEMBER AREA CONTENT and their usefulness have anything to do with whether my affiliate site - or anyone else's - is crappy. i'm talking about what i might give my MEMBERS, not my affiliates.

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Originally posted by leedsfan
sorry basschick, but i just checked out your home page. I like my design better than yours. lol.

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Dzinerbear - amen! that was a great, and very true, post. it should be framed and sent to every lease content provider.

have you ever seen a bear curtsy?
:)

why am i picturing this bear curtsying in a tutu?

btw, i used to do dom for a living, and i used to have a very hairy burly guy named jim dress as a maid. i've seen him curtsy.