RE: Babeshows - General Chat & Discussion
BS have posted this up on there blog, not seen such sense post by a channel in a long time, thought this was worth posting here as a really good read
There has often been a considerable disparity between the list of TV babes that fans in online communities are in to, and the list of TV babes that viewers are most likely to call. There are girls on Twitter able to draw masses of engagement in the virtual world, yet they can be consistently subordinated in the babe show schedules by performers who attract very little fan engagement online. Girls who are popular on the web are not necessarily able to replicate that level of popularity on the biggest TV babe channels.
Further, there has been a tendency through time for new TV babes, who already have high profiles online when they join, to come second to babe show ‘natives’ in TV scheduling. Those wider known personalities are much less likely to join the babe shows today. In the past, when the channels like Babestation more commonly brought in women from the published glamour scene, reality TV or high-end porn, a premium name certainly didn’t default to premium airtime. The prospect of pornstars hooking up with premium babe channels is getting to look quite remote today, even though, technically, pornstars appear to be among the best qualified outsiders.
So what are the implications of this? Well, it’s clearly a pretty stark fact that generating revenue in a babe show format is not directly related to wider appeal or popularity. Why is that? Why can’t babes who create a big buzz elsewhere, create an equally big buzz on TV? If a performer can demonstrate high appeal and has a vast army of men following her around on Twitter/Instagram with their tongues hanging out, but can’t translate that enormous pulling power into babe show sales, then is the problem really her, or is it the business? Or is it just the internet? Preeti Young is one of a limited number of girls who have evidently drawn top levels of attention both on social media and on the TV channels
Undeniably, the internet’s natural inclination toward promoting free content at the expense of paid services has meant that those who entertain for free online will have the advantage when it comes to gaining mass attention. Similarly, the music business has been commercially devastated by the free music culture that began with file-sharing programs like Napster and lives on in things like Spotify. Not only are popular tracks are available for free on a range of sites at the click of a mouse, it’s also requires smaller artists to both make their work available for free, as standard, then push it hard via social media. As a musician, if you won’t let people hear your material for free, you can’t compete, but as soon as you’ve uploaded for free sharing, you’ve given the material away. It’s a kind of catch-22 and it’s very similar in all creative and entertainment-based industries in the 21st century.
In the world of adult entertainment, initiatives like Pay For Your Porn have been devised as a means to fight back against the internet’s free culture and re-establish a mindset that premium, paid content is way superior to freebies. The problem is, just like in the music business, that may well not be true. The nature of advertising dictates that providers have to show off something worth watching in their promotions, otherwise no one will take any notice. The difficulty is in finding the line between ‘good enough for an advert’ and, in crude terms, ‘good enough for a wank’. If the advertising is good enough for a wank, then it enters that catch-22 territory and defeats its own purpose.
The adult industry doesn’t even have that golden saving grace of the music business to fall back on; namely, the gift market. People still buy plenty of music products as gifts – vinyl releases in particular have helped to restore some of the purpose in actually shelling out for a non-virtual artefact. Recordings on vinyl make a fantastic gift even if you’ve heard the track a billion times online. Who’s going to give a subscription to an adult service as a gift? It just isn’t going to happen.
The models who promote heavily for free online are going to attract a lot of online attention, but unless they’re really clever with what they give away (and that includes attention as well as erotica), they could suffer for it in the TV realm. Why call or text a babe if she’ll chat to you on Twitter? Why pay to download her explicit pics if she tweets explicit pics for free? Lori Buckby barely acknowledges fans online and gets few fan mentions on Twitter, in comparison to some TV babes who are known to reply, retweet and/or post free nude pics. Lori has nevertheless evidently been a monumental force when it comes to jamming calls onto a Babestation phone line. Are some of those calls made because she doesn’t give away the goods elsewhere?
Another obvious explanation for the disparity between wider popularity and babe show popularity would be the performer’s call-handling skills. Posting sexy pictures for free on Twitter and entertaining paying customers on a phone call are two very different things. From the punter’s end, wanting to talk to a girl (or listen to her talking sex) has different dynamics from just wanting to see naked pictures of her. A babe show ‘native’ may understand sex chat in a way that a girl from outside the genre does not. More than this, a babe show ‘native’ may have a better understanding of how to market herself in that environment, based on experience.
Babe show marketing is about creating a fantasy – often a fantasy that doesn’t really exist. As a result, some of the most successful girls have been the ones who can best detach from the truth. In contrast, some of the girls who’ve found it harder to compete at the top end of the TV channels (at least in more recent times) have been the most persistently genuine.
I’m not judging the models for the way they handle their marketing, what they are prepared to imply and what they’re not, but I am saying there is a trend of correlation between a model’s willingness to blag and her success on the babe shows. I’d also go as far as to say that if it’s almost become a prerequisite that certain shows’ TV babes must employ overly disingenuous marketing in order to remain competitive, then the whole system needs to be looked at, from the top. Jemma Jey, who announced her retirement from the TV channels, has been one of the best respected babe show babes among knowledgeable, long-time fans. The actions-speak-louder-than-words approach epitomised by girls like Jemma seemed in vogue back in the noughties when programmes like Party Girls were delivering babe channel night shows to the wider audience. As time has progressed, though, hype has more commonly taken precedence over delivery, leaving straight-up, service-driven models like Jemma (as opposed to ad/hype-driven girls) less likely to fit into the highest profile areas of the market.
The phenomenon in which well-liked and lusted-after babes in parallel areas of the entertainment spectrum often can’t establish a commercial compatibility with the babe shows is a very real one. It does make sense if you look closely at how the business currently works. But it shouldn’t make sense, because existing popularity does not logically equal failure. When things seem to start to running up against logic there’s usually something fundamentally wrong, or at least something we don’t yet understand. The internet and social media must take its share of the blame for this strange state of affairs, but I don’t believe it’s solely responsible.
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