Hi All I really appreciate all the feedback that everyone who replied here took the time to write to me. I respect most everything that was said here and I thank you all that most of you responded in a respectful and polite way. I read and digested all that was said and I think that there are huge misconceptions out there about what I do and my business. First off I was attacked for making too much money and that in light of that, I should be glad that thousands of people are downloading complete DVD rips for free from many places on the web. I will agree that it is pretty much becoming a losing battle trying to protect my copyrights on the web, but I would like to possibly enlighten some of you as to the economics of my business. Many of you will not closely read this treatise and will not have your minds changed, no matter what. Like the rest of the anarchy on the web, you want to do what you want to do and you will begrudge anyone who tries to stop you from being able to do what you have been doing. OK, I know that but this post is for those open minded souls who can read this and begin to understand what it is that I deal with on a day to day basis after over ten years in this business. I do not own my videos. I make them and sell the rights to a distributor who then sells them around the world. They used to make some serious money but my distributor recently sold and got out of the business (he saw the writing on the wall???) and the new owner is learning very quickly that there may not be enough money in the business for him to continue to buy my material. You people think that they sell thousands of my videos. NOT!!! One of my good releases only sells 700-800 copies these days. At $8 a DVD wholesale to the stores and middlemen distributors, my distributor might be making $1000 per release. And remember this, they sell other material but mine is by and far the biggest selling, therefore the most profitable. No wonder they are thinking of getting out of the business. Anllover posted these figures and I quote: "SO just to make this interesting lets just say; $1500 for Ty $1500 for cameras and lights $1500 for editing" Do you guys realize as he is telling you what he thinks it costs me to make a video, that his figures add up to more than one thousand dollars more than I get paid outright for my video rights. I never see another dollar on a video once it is sold, no matter how many copies get sold. That is the way it is in this business, and believe it or not, I have a pretty good deal. There are four other producers that my distributor buys from and they get much much less than I do per video. Why do I pay the girls so much? Yes, maybe I am a bad business person, but when I started in the business, people were paying me $150 per video. Yup, that is true. I did several videos and then my husband and I decided that we could try and make out own videos. We never got into the business to make a living. It was kind of a hobby. Steph and I are long time swingers and we were working with our swinger friends and having fun. If we made an extra $5000-10,000 a year, that was party money. We could take a cruise or go to another swing convention. The reality is that for many years we did not care if we made any money. At the most we might make $1000 on a video, but did not care. We were making most of our money on the web. In the years past, the website business was a great business and we did make some pretty good money back then,.There were many reasons for that, one is we did not have alot of competition as some of you have pointed out but also we kept our stuff exclusive and it was not posted all over the web. You had to come to my sites to see it. Remember 56K modems? The biggest clips you saw posted in the newsgroups (remember them?) and on BBS boards was 5 or 7 megs. People were not posting 200, 400, 800 meg or even 1.2 gig files of my videos. I agree with you all, the internet has really changed quickly in the last few years. There are a few costs for making my videos that you neglected to think of and they are big ones. What about the airfare for the girls (none of my models live within 200 miles of me) that I pay up front and their hotel rooms and meals which I cover for all my models every time they come out. Yes my cameras have paid for themselves many times over, but there are many expenses that you are not aware of. What about the $5000 a month I pay for my bandwidth, tech and servers to be co-located. Or the $2500 a year that VISA and Mastercard charge me for each of my two bank accounts. Or my very expensive quad Xenon servers (0f which I have four) to keep my site fast for my members which must be replaced about every two years. Have you priced those lately??? Steph and I pay ourselves $2000 a month each out of the business. Did you know that is only $2800 a month for both of us after taxes (YES, I pay my taxes). I do not call that alot of money. Here in Southern California we have had $3.50 gasoline since the beginning of the year and it is going up quickly. Car insurance, gas and electric are all higher here than in any other part of the country. We are not living high off the hog. Now you may say that is our fault and that we are just bad business people. That may be so, but when I get out of this business, you will not longer see Extreme Missy, Alysha, Shelby and Ty. Now I will not go on about how poor we are because we are not. We are lucky that we were doing OK before we got into this business and from other businesses that we both had before. Therefore, we have been able to make it with less money, but we are far from rich or getting rich from what we do. I will not argue that we are probably not amateurs any more, but we strive to hire girls who are not pros. That is why all of our models are flown in from somewhere other than Southern California. That is why they all do not look and act like the typical porn pro that you see in all the rest of the videos. We have tried to break the mold in what we do and how we do it. I am glad to see that many of you realize that we were pioneers in the biz. My models come from Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida and Missourri. I could get hundreds of girls from Los Angeles where there are thousands of wanna be porn stars looking for work there, but then my videos would be just like all the other 500-1000 videos a month that come out of L.A. I might also be over the hill. I am going to be 59 years old this year. I am most likely the oldest continuously working porn star in the business and my girls are older, too. I do not work with the 19 and 20somethings. I do not know any 20somethings and I rarely use them in my videos. For good or for bad, I am who I am and I do not try to be anything that I am not. Yes, I do cater to a niche market and for better or worse, that is the playing field that I have chosen to work in. I am glad to have been able to pretty much write my own ticket in the business and do it my own way for all these years. I do not know any of the mainstream porn stars that work 150 miles north of me in Los Angeles. I do not hang out with any porn people. I have nothing in common with them. Many of the ones I have met have alot of baggage and are into things I am not such as drugs and other similar scenes. That is not me. I promised myself long ago when I got into the business that I would never be like that. That is not to say that when hiring some of my girls, that they have not been like that. I have met and worked with some girls who were borderline psychotic, into heavy drugs and carrying all kinds of strange baggage. Needless to say, they did not last long with me, but that is another story. Many of you probably did not know that it is illegal to shoot porn videos almost anywhere in the USA. If you get caught, you get arrested and will definitely spend time in jail. Some of you will not believe all of this but I am not here to argue or contradict anyone. I am merely telling you like it is from someone who has spent a very long time in the biz. Then there is the issue of rebilling customers on the web. if any of you have ever been a member of my site, you will know that I have never automatically rebilled my members. People who have rebilling sites will tell you that 75 to 85 percent of their income comes from the rebilling of their customers. My problem with that is that more than half of those being rebilled never visit the site and download material. How do you think those sites can afford to offer those $1 memberships. They KNOW that more than a third of those people will forget or will not cancel the rebilling and that the average time a person is rebilled at a site is 6 months. Most of those people are not downloading from the site. I just never felt that was ethical. At one time, Congress was preparing to outlaw automatic rebilling. They never did but that told me that maybe it was not the most ethical way to run my business. Could I have gotten alot richer by rebilling??? Oh yes! But my conscience is good about what I do and I have never taken money from people who did not want me to have it. Also, I must continue to offer my members a quality site month after month or they just go away. It may have been a mistake but it has worked for ten years, so if it is not broke, don't fix it. Now all of this leads to the main question Should I be happy with the proliferation of my material being posted all over the web to download for free. Well, here is what I feel. I never chase down pictures of mine that are posted around the web. As long as someone does not remove my copyright or watermark from the photos, they are to me what you all have suggested. Free advertising and a great way for people to get a taste of who Denni O is and what my sites are all about. But that is not what I have been seeing the most of lately and that is not what I requested Rapidshare and MegaUpload to remove or take down. My whole and complete videos have been being ripped and are being posted. No watermark, no mention at all in many cases who the video is or where it came from. These are not clips, they are complete videos in a huge resolution and size. Just as if you had the DVD, but with nothing to even say that they are Denni O videos. As I told you before, we are only selling 700-800 of my DVDs to every store in the world. I am seeing the download numbers on these free posts. Often there are 1200-1800 downloads of my complete videos at just one site. That is more than double how many legitimate copies are sold worldwide. Now I am talking about one video, one post, one site. Multiply that times what, ten sites??? twenty sites??? One hundred sites??? and you can easily see that those downloads ARE cutting into our DVD sales and my website memberships. I have been around on the web a long time and I know that members of this board probably have their hard drives packed full with the stuff they have downloaded from Rapidshare and the like. Why would a person pay $24.95 to buy one of my videos when in one day four or five of my videos are being posted here or elsewhere and they can be had for nothing. Why pay to join my site when you can download 20 or 40 hours of my material for free? If you are honest with yourself, the ONLY reason that someone buys those DVDs or a membership to my site is because they cannot get it for free or cannot get enough of it for free. Think about it. It is the rare soul who downloads a DVD quality copy of my video from Rapidshare who then goes on to buy the legit DVD. I know this is counter to what some of you believe and have posted here but this is my opinion and I may know something about it since I have been in the business for ten plus years. If 50,000 people are viewing one of my videos for free and we are only selling 800 of them to all the stores worldwide, where is the economic goodness there. If these were truly "sample clips" as some of you have stated, that would not be a problem, but we are not talking about that. Now there were some interesting counterpoints to my view on this issue posted here and I read them all and considered them carefully but almost off of them were colored with the misguided misconceptions that we were making plenty of money from our efforts and that you guys should be allowed to have your fun in spite of it all. Well, I hope you all can be open minded enough to try and empathize with my position and try and see if from my point of view, as well. This free sharing of porn is going to be the death of the porn business and that will not be good for all consumers of the product. Many porn companies have gone belly up in the past three years. Good long standing companies have gone by the wayside because their business became economically not viable. I forsee that happening to my distributor in a couple years. Maybe less. What happens when that occurs??? You guys as a community lose people like Ty and all the girls I produce with. Then that leaves only the people who do amateur work and do it for no money. Many of you would applaud that, but consider this. Most normal every day people are not willing to post themselves in all their glory doing porn or worse yet the bizarre stuff that we all who patronize this board appreciate. It has been hard for me to find good models who are "talented" enough to be in my features. They are not on every street corner and for every potential model I have met only a very small percentage of them are willing to "go public" and do it for a video that will receive worldwide distribution. How do I get them to do it then? I pay them exorbitant checks (the average girl in LA makes $500-800 per video) so that they keep coming back over and over. I do not have contracts with these girls. What good is that if I do not treat them right and give them what they feel it is worth to expose themselves like they do. YES, the girls make more money on the videos than I do (Again maybe bad business) but Steph and I decided that we were not going to be like the other companies out there that pimp the girls and pay them peanuts. You do not think TY would have spent 10 years with us if we were paying her the minimum. You can be assured that many other video companies have approached all of my girls and tried to get them to work for them. They remain loyal to us because of how we treat them and who we are. Maybe we are all over the hill and our material no longer relevant. Yes, beautiful younger women are doing what we do now all the time. Yes, our niche appears to be getting smaller and smaller as time goes on. Maybe we should and will be getting out of the business in the near future. Not because we do not like what we do, but because we are hard workers who would be successful in any business that we chose to apply ourselves in. There are new opportunities out there and maybe one of them is for us. I used to do it because I liked hearing from and meeting my fans. Their praise and respect made all the negative parts of my work worth it .When couples wrote me asking about how to fist or do big toys, I felt relevant and needed by the sexy public out there who appreciated what we all did. It was never because we were getting rich or fat off of our videos. There was a time when we made some really good money but those days are many years past and the past four or five years have been relatively meager ones. Maybe it is time to pass the torch and let the younger girls continue with the quest. Only time will tell. I hope this super long rant has opened some of your eyes to the challenges of what it is like to be a producer of extreme porn today. I have not even touched on the legal risks or emotional havoc that challenges us girls who do this kind of work. That is another complete story. I know that many of you will say, "So what" because you still want to get your porn for free and damn anyone who tries to stop you. BUT someone is paying to make the material that you all so love and regardless of what you may think, we are not getting rich doing it. Yes, some of the webgirls such as Wifey and a few others have gotten very rich from the web. They were lucky and I think they would be the first to tell you that it is not what it use to be these days. I would like to be part of this community. Steph and I (we both use the same username, that is why my profile says male, Steph signed up for this account here) would definitely like to share our stuff here and can even see ourselves doing a special piece or two for the RBB members. I will honestly say, that I would like to see some new members to my site as a result of posting here. I will not lie and say otherwise. That means making a few $$$, but that is only fair. You all expect to make money when you work and anyone who says that making a real porn video is not work has never done it. We have spent 12 hours making a video before. That is under hot lights and often frustrating conditions. It is not easy and many times the new girls cannot handle it. That does not make me some kind of saint or better than average person. We are just regular real people who have refused to buy into the typical porn lifestyle and anyone who really knows Stephan and I will attest to that. Maybe I wasted my time posting this long rant, but if just one of you sees the light and understands what we go through and feel. Then maybe it was worth it. Thanks for giving me the space and time to express my feelings. This will be my last post on this subject. Denni
