RE: Babestation - General Chat & Discussion
Kerr and Phil have not said much that contradicts each other here IMO. And I applaud everyone's attempts to bring a correct context to these things. History is important. It can, indeed, be very instructive to what's going on with the industry in the present day... So here's my twopenneth.
BS's 2015 "response" was as a result of S66 suddenly having a big success with pervcam. None of the operators could make online PAY for them prior to that. (It was something the industry needed because, as Phil implies, Ofcom's intervention seems to have sent call numbers into terminal decline.) The audience (and the tech?) seemingly wasn't ready for a switch to online prior to that point. Ofcom hurried the need to look in that direction.
66's competition needed to respond and did. Thereafter, the industry thought it'd found its saviour in the web. But...
Ever since, the industry's desperation to claw back lost call revenue has led to an utterly single-minded throwing of one silly web option after another at the customer. With scant regard to how each layer muddles customer satisfaction rates. Callers in particular have been hard done by as focus and content was turned from them to paywall-based material. (This forum is full of anecdotal evidence, direct from the horse's mouth, that this has sped the decline in calls.) This is something the industry has never acknowledged nor have they faced up to what that means for the future of calling the shows. Weirdly, no insider seems to see the caller as an essential and, worse, there's the vague impression that they've sometimes been punished for the supposed 'disloyalty' in their falling numbers.
Essentially, the eternal conundrum no operator has yet been able to solve is what use is a babeshow if it can't get calls? What does it then offer that a 100 other web-only operators do not? Because let's face it, it seems few guys wanna phone web babes on a regular basis when all the other options are muddying their outcomes. Babeshow calling may, in fact, be inextricably tied into our parochial 900s, with their relatively high production costs, and the passive attraction to mass passing trade it provides (or once provided). (No one "flicks through" the web basically. Casual passing trade is not there; it can't be converted to paid interaction in the same way it was with TV and never will be. So, when the TV channel's easy visual appeals declined, so did the conversion rates. And thus, the number of guys getting into the habit of interacting with the industry's services. TV as gateway has faltered. Operators became keen to do without. But each time one stepped away from TV, to try life without its expense, it ended up closing down. None has been able to make up what was lost from abandoning TV entirely. That's a lesson of the last 9 years that's hard to ignore at this point.
The trouble for the babeshow fan these days is that a channel that lacks calls is well on the way to not being a babe channel anymore. It's just a plain old camming outlet - something that has a MASSIVE amount of competition online. What does the former babeshow have to offer the babe and/or even invested customers in these circumstamces? (Let alone users who are only familiar with Netflix, etc., not Sky or Freeview. The recognition and visibility of the BS name only looks likely to decline if we continue in the current vein.) What different from the 100 other web-only operators out there, I mean. The established internet-only operators have all the advantages in that environment.
And what are BS doing to avoid this fate? Apart from not giving up their last TV slot? Not a fat lot as far as I can see. (The lack of direct competition doesn't help, inclining to a lack of impetus for any operator to think outside-the-box or buck any trend. It's so easy to imagine them contenting themselves with their market share numbers and how much they are ringing from the top few whales.)
If BS truly thinks they've benefited from a lack of competition in the now shrunken market, they should, perhaps, be wary of shrinking the market to such an extent it can no longer support them. (No matter whether the shrink was cause and/or effect of what they did over of the last 10 years.)
Babeshow n. - Live Adult Entertainment genre based around premium-rate phome sex chat lines. Scantily-clad female presenter induces callers and users to other inactive services from three-walled set in a TV studio. Largely softcore Tease format influenced by standards and strictures of free-to-air TV platform..
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