You can give up, up to 40% of your sales, I’ve even heard tell of some sites wanting more then that. In exchange you get a platform to sell your content, all the payment processing by the clips site and they host your content for sale. Okay lets break this down a little further.
A Platform: it’s a great thing. They have customers, you want customers a win/win right? Wrong, not all clip sites have customers. Several (you know who you are Kinkbomb) have a website but they don’t have any traffic to speak of. So though you have a place to sell your content, if the clip studio isn’t bringing traffic to the table then really its like selling your content in a consignment shop in a part of town no one goes to.
Payment Processing: Hooray for someone else doing the payment processing. It’s not easy for adult business to get merchant accounts and i know that sounds strange considering how much business is done in the adult content realm but its true. So a clip site will handle your payment processing, do the accounting and send you a check at the end of the month for your “commission” on your sales. That too is a great thing and it sure sounds like its worth giving up a portion of your profits to have someone else handle that aspect and its is.. it is unless they are inundated with charge backs and fraud reports and then pass those costs on to you or maybe just saying they are getting them so they can skim off your earnings. It happens more then you think.
Hosting content for sale: someones gotta host it because it has to be available for download sale. This is the one thing that almost all of the clip sites get right. Unless they have a server melt down or something and then you have to start from scratch with a site. On the plus side ive only heard of this happening once. (couch, couch, kinkbomb, cough, cough)
Those those are the things you get from any clip site and what you give up is up to and likely 40% of your sales. Think about it… 40% thats a lot of scratch to give up. You sell a video for 10 bucks you are only getting $6.00 sell 50 of them instead of making 500.00 you make 300.00. So in exchange for that you want to get the best deal you can and make sure the sites you are selling though are holding up their end of the implied and sometimes not so implied bargain. A clip site can give you 70% of your sales but if they have no customers for you to sell to, 70% of nothing is still nothing.
So let me break down sites I’ve had personal experience with:
Clips4Sale: By far the site with the most traffic, a large operation with a solid reputation and an actual team of people. They earn their 40% of sales by bringing customers to the table, they process all payments and you get a check every month like fucking clock work. Since they are the biggest of the sites they also do a fair amount of promoting and will even send out the occasional email to their studios giving them ideas on how to increase sales. I have no complaints. If you work hard and use all the site features it pays off plain and simple.
Clippette: In business just about a year Clippette is almost all fetish driven content and its run by fetish people. It’s a smaller site and therefore not a far reaching but their customers are targeted. If you’re a stockings, foot or hypnosis fetish person you’re likely going to be checking out Clippette. Also being a smaller site the customer service with these guys is impeccable. They not only are right on top of any issues from technical to administrative but they do fun promotions and take feedback like a champ. Ive seen them implement several suggestions i personally made which resulted in increased sales. Love that!
Kinkbomb: Yeah, I’ve written about them before and I did remove all my content from them. They have been in business about a year. Its about 4 guys who run it and the president is the boyfriend of a top selling online Domme. It’s rumored that her and her friends get 80-100% on their payouts hence them not having any issues diverting their customers from Clips4sale to Kinkbomb where they make more on each sale. However Kinkbomb has very low traffic and is plagued with “charge backs” be they real (because words gotten out amongst customers that a charge back with Kinkbomb is a given) or made up as to make up for costs from the smaller studios because the cut is so big on the larger selling ones, who knows. My personal experience sucked, maybe you’ll have better luck… ha, as if.
Clipvia: Another side project of a couple of guys who have day jobs. Clipvia will pay out 70% to studios which is great. Sadly though they have very little traffic and 70% of nothing is still nothing. Since it’s two guys with day jobs the customer service is sucky and they handle issues with a often broken 3rd party application and not by email (Really?) Though I think this guys intentions are in the right place clearly he doesn’t have the time to dedicate to growing a start up.
Eclips: Also a new site just over a year old. This ones got a strange interface for uploading your content and they have been plagued with merchant account issues. The owner is really very sweet and all my interactions with him have been great, i only wish they had any traffic… at all. No traffic means no sales.
Update: 10/4/2017
Clippette shut down after losing their payment processor. Clipvia shut down after ripping off all thier studios and not paying them, Eclips disappeared one day. Kinkbomb andClips4Sale are still alive and kicking.