NotSoSilent wrote:The other thing about MFF, is that at one time there was a section of
"Girls with Sites". This section was dumped when "someone" decided to be totally
amateur not so long ago. I know that Homeclips declined at that time, and somedays you only get 4 to 6 videos, most of them short enought to post to the RC boards.
I was just going to mention the old GWS. They were really dominant on HC when we first started posting five years ago. It was a little different from MFF insofar as most of the GWSs seemed to have started as amateur on VW/RC/HC and gone into GWS as a kind of profit-sharing arrangement within VW. Which doesn't sound so bad on the face of it, but they could only make money by generating a certain amount of traffic every month, which meant they had to crank out the material and there was a fake and pandering quality to their stuff, at least to my eyes, although they were much liked by a lot of viewers at the time. Some of us tried to lobby against them or to exclude them from prizes, but after generating a pretty lively and interesting BB discussion we were abruptly shut down by Igor/VW. A year or so later the GWS abruptly disappeared themselves. The story that eventually came out -- Igor offered no information at all, I think, but I had by then established offline communication with a couple of them -- was that their earnings were taxable in the US and VW was supposed to be responsible for collecting them which it hadn't done and it was shut down as part of a deal with the IRS.
These are approximate recollections, so correct me if I'm wrong.
On HC, MFF isn't really all that obtrusive, because they're labeled and appear at the bottom of the list every day. And I've only seen one ever even get into contention for a prize. People absolutely wail on them for their fakery and boob jobs, etc., etc. So I can't really see that VW can be making a whole lot of money off their videos, anyway. Fakery is more obvious in real time than in photos, at least to me (others may disagree).
Seems like a lot of people hate the MFF a lot more than they did GWS -- any thoughts on that?