This text mostly concerns solo girls, not production companies. It’s based on clips4sale.com, the only place where you can really earn a living with a clipstore.
It’s probably the most asked question of all the questions that people have before starting an adult clipstore: how much can you make with an adult clipstore?
The answer is simple. It’s so simple that I think most people already know the answer, but they just want to hear others say it, so that they can compare themselves with these others and form a decision about whether or not they could achieve the same.
When I say I make $4000 / month and you read that, you start looking at what I do and then you think: “Oh, I can do that” or you think “Oh, that’s a lot of work for $4000”. Most people think they can do it, they have great ideas, they could do better than others. And they might be right!
The thing is – and it’s hard to ignore that – if you only start a store to make money, you have a high chance to fail. Simply because money is your motivation and you will not get a lot of motivation in the beginning. The beginning, that is at least 3 months for mortal human beings.
Yes, there are very very few adult clipstores who make it BIG right away, there are stores who only upload 1 clip a week and do great – but those are exceptions and most of them do stuff in the background that you don’t see – like heavy promotion. They might even have such a high “limit”. I’ll explain at the end of this article what that limit means, but it’s basically the moment where more frequent updates are not worth it anymore.
Stores who have been founded because of passion, because of creativity, because of the need to express or just because someone thought it was fun to make a clip and sell it, these stores often have a high chance of “surviving” those first months, building up a fanbase and producing a constant quality of clips.
If your sole purpose is money, a lack of earnings often shows in your clips. The viewer feels how demotivated you are and that’s a huge turn off. Imagine a clown in a circus who doesn’t even want to be there. You will notice and the show will suck. Your kids might not notice, but you will. And that goes for fetishes / niche clips as well. The customers are mostly year long veterans in their fetish. They have seen thousands of clips. They can hear if a fart is fake or real and they can smell from a mile away if you like what you are doing or if you just do it to earn money.
Most will accept that no woman could actually be into what they like and they are happy that someone took the time to cater to their fetish at all, but if you really like what you are doing, that’s when you stand out, that’s when you get loyal customers and that’s when word in the community spreads about you.
And there is a community, small or big, for just about everything.
Think about yourself. Do you want to drag yourself through months of “work” (which you will see purely as work) for a few hundred $?
No. You have to find your inner motivation. There are more than 800 categories. If you are not into one of them, you might at least find one that you think is fun. Like popping balloons or pedal pumping your car. It could also be great fun for you to do chores and know you might earn money while doing it. Housecleaning, rubber gloves, vacuuming – there are customers for that.
Do you think it’s stupid that men pay for porn? Do you find them ridiculous? Great! Here is your motivation to make domination clips.
If you don’t have ANY motivation other than earning money, the answer to the question “How much can you make with an adult clipstore?” is simple: not enough.
This is different for production companies, but as a solo model, filming, editing, uploading, promoting, family life and everything else is just a lot of effort that you have to put in every day. And you won’t make it if you rely on money as a motivator.
Look around the categories, the new clipstores with 10, 11, 14 clips. Maybe 26, 35. More than 1-2 months no updates. Those are dead. They gave up. They didn’t earn enough to stay alive, to get through the start-up phase.
This is the current list from the foot fetish category. It’s the 17th of June 2016 today. See how many dead studios you can spot:
I had great clips, unique, fresh, real fetish myself – the perfect base to become popular. And I didn’t get rich overnight either. I didn’t reach #1 in my category within 3 months. But I still remember how I saw myself on #19 for the first time. I had not even noticed that I was in the toplist. As a young, starting girl, I really thought c4s was as big as the universe and the top 50 of each category were miles away, the top 10 lightyears away from me.
It took me over a year to find out that anyone could get into the top. With hard work, dedication but also by enjoying the life and continuing even when you earn nothing for a day or two.
I’d say ignore the money for the first few months, but I know it’s not possible. Money is just too strong of a force in our world. It’s a sad, sad thing really. What if money didn’t exist? We would have some kind of motivation for sure. Maybe more pure motivation, more intrinsic.
How much can you make with an adult clipstore?
On clips4sale, you can make anything from 0$ to $1000 quite easily. Your store could be a standard living room that you clean once in a while, vacuum, buy new furniture.. nothing fancy, nothing too complicated, nothing you would improve upon every day.
$1000 – $3000 if you “like” your store. It’s your baby. You don’t care so much about the money, as long as your living room is pretty and up to date with fresh interior, flowers, accessories every day or two. You wash the curtains once a month and vacuum regularly.
$3000+ this is when you start reaching limits. You replace the TV with a big flatscreen, you put in a small housebar you get an expensive couch. Your living room looks very nice and there are only a few things you can do every week to make it better – like changing the flowers, cleaning a little dust.
In other words, once you have an established store with daily updates and a following, you should relax a bit. More updates won’t help you as well as in the beginning. Try to calculate your earnings / hour of work you put in.
Would you rather work 14 hours / day and earn $6000 / month or just work 5 hours / day for $3500 / month?
That’s $14.28 / hour vs. $23.33 / hour. There will be a moment when you have to think about that and find the right balance. That is the secret behind the top stores not updating more than 1 / day. Two clips a day don’t get you twice the money from a certain point. They might only get you %10 more for twice the work.
If you reach that point, you can always start a second store, use more time for promotion, accept more customs – get cozy in your living room and start a new operation from there.
To answer the question again: How much can you make with an adult clipstore? 0$ – limit. There is a limit. I don’t now how high it is, but one store can only make so much before more work doesn’t pay off as much as starting something else would.
Sinna. I’ve been reading your blog for the past 2 weeks, trying to learn as much as I can so I can open my own clip store. However, I wonder if not having a fetish will work against me… The clips I’m making are highly sexual and me and my partner are absolutely enjoying ourselves, but they can’t be classified as fetish. What do you think?
Thank you so much!!!
Hello Julia,
first of all, welcome here and thank you for your comment. It motivates me to keep writing and implementing changes on adult-income. You will find a few things have changed on clips4sale, but nothing that would be totally different and make the information you got here useless.
Since I wrote my beginners guide, I have run several clipstores with content outside of my own fetish and I must say, I am a little surprised about it myself: It seems to me that there is a lot more money to be earned outside of my fetish – my comfort zone. It feels different, because I didn’t get into doing this because of the money, I started from within my passion and a deep frustration about the current state of clips available online. Mainly the faking of pee love for money made me angry and motivated me to show myself as a true fetishist.
However, today I am thinking: what if I had broadened my spectrum early on, not focused on just one thing? Giving an answer is not easy, but I have learned that both are possible. Not having a fetish means you can spread out and conquer, fly around, dip into things whenever and however you want. It will let you earn in places a fetishist would never come and it will frustrate you in areas the fetishist will never know. The fetishist will have to stay on top of his category, which is not easy, and fight downswings within the one very category that is losing the money. A difficult challenge.
There are pro’s and con’s to both sides, but when I wrote that having a fetish is an advantage, I didn’t realize the possibilities of NOT having a fetish.
Having said that, highly sexual clips with your partner are high in demand. If you keep it authentic, maybe themed – choose not to have the perfect camera shot, rather make it intimate. Try what couples would try, not what pornstars would. Then it can surely work. I get a lot of custom requests for boy / girl as well, although I am solo. I guess couples get even more.
The crux of c4s is still, in 99% of the cases, updating for exposure. There are ten’s of thousands of studios competing for millions of customers. Everybody gets a piece, but the one in the showcase gets more. To be in that showcase, you want to update a lot and climb in certain categories. It’s easier to conquer categories when you focus. You will almost never reach a category top 10 when you don’t repeat posting in that category, when you always hop on to new categories.
I would still limit the categories you go for, because of that. Not necessarily 5 like I thought 2 years ago, but maybe keep it at 20 core ones and a total 50 to spread out at first. Don’t post into a new category every day. I would say that would kill any momentum.
I hope I could help 🙂
First thought: you’re amazing! You’re taking care of this blog with such dedication!
Thank you for replying. I feel more inspired now, I’m still confused about the category part, but I’ll try and read it again.
*big hug*
Julia
Hello Julia,
probably my bad. The category part is simple: If you have a fetish, you are practically bound to the category/ies that come with the fetish. This gives you advantages:
+ you get a lot of updates in that one category, making it easy to climb the toplist
+ you easily make clips, because you know what turns people in that category on
+ you are more motivated, because making clips is fun and in your comfort zone
stuff like that
If you don’t have a fetish, you can post in many more categories, but you won’t necessarily get those advantages. You’ll get other advantages though:
+ more exposure by being visible in more categories’ updated studio list
+ more chance to hit a “secret” category that can earn a lot (e.g. dolls, breast expansion)
+ more diversity and fun
+ more customs
However, if you post in all 800 categories, every day a new category, you won’t be able to build momentum in any 1 of those. Momentum means you make a few sales that count towards your toplist score (= combined amount of money you earned in that category) and when you publish another clip in that same category, any sales from that add to your score, as well as make people aware that there are also other clips of you to purchase in that category. Posting more and more clips in the same categorie(s) will build you more score, meaning a higher placement in the toplist, potentially leading to more exposure and sales (being #1 in a category can give a nice boost)
I hope that explains my confusing earlier words a little 😛 Sorry, I can be a little socially disenabled 😛
That explains perfectly! 😀
i am planning to get started on c4s, i am into foot fetish and domination but since femdom is too competitive, i guess i would start with foot fetish which is again a very popular category. Do u think right at this point in 2017 there is much scope for a totally new store with feet stuffs to do well? I am a solo model (female)
Hello,
yes I think there is. Foot fetish is very popular and if you can pull off something unique and exciting, you can stand out, then you can be successful.
Hello Sinna I am the “producer”/”slave” of https://clips4sale.com/116460/queen-k-waitress-foot-dom/cidd8ed685a6933f5a8d72e138e4f
I just wanted to thank you on behalf of my Queen and myself for all the free advice and guidance you’ve provided. We are just a small amateur store and we opened up about 6 months ago. We were totally in over our heads in the beginning until we found some of the guidance you graciously provided for free to help people. We really tried to listen to your advice and follow your suggestions on pretty much everything and by the 3rd month we were making over $1000per month. The problem is life gets in the way sometimes work,kids,obligations,bills,etc and we weren’t able to update as often as you suggest. Not only that we just started to run out of different ideas as we began building our library of clips. We bought a nice lighting kit after a few months and again learned so much from you about the importance of lighting and updating and writing proper descriptions and countless things and we began to see our sales climb higher and higher. Then around August/September sales just began to drop. A LOT!! Since then our sales have been less than half and falling. We couldn’t keep up with the pace of updating a new clip everyday although we’ve been doing the best we can putting out greatest hit compilations, making sure we post in different categories 1mp4 then a different category for 1wmv. Tryin to do whatever we can while we juggle everything else in life. I just feel like we’re limited on what we can do financially and can’t compete with the mega stores and their unlimited funds. What sucks is for a.few months we were dominating quite a few foot categories. We were #1 store and #1 clip several times in several categories topping the mega stores and also would have a bunch of clips in the top 20 in 5 or 6 categories. We were getting more and more memberships and we were shocked that for a few months we could see our store on top of all the big stores that have been around forever. We couldn’t believe it!!! Then right around when the hurricanes started showing up our sales plummeted. No matter what we put out or how hard we tried the preparation time, the exact camera angle, the lighting, the makeup, then the shooting of the clip, then the.editing, then the time it takes to write good.description get exact gif (starting with a great 1st pic because its the.1st thing the.customer will see totally learned that from you) then the posting it all adds up to so much time and effort and we’re not seeing anywhere near the $$$. My Queen is getting upset and starting to think its.time to quit and shut it down. But I’ve seen what we’re capable of and as the lucky slaveboy that I am I really dont wanna throw in the towel yet. Sinna or anyone else reading this who has a successful clips4sale clip store do you have any suggestions or advice? We never expected to get rich doing clips but we did see for a few months that making $1000 a month to help with bills is totally possible and thats really what we’re aiming for. We update as much as life allows, we have a membership site, we post on twitter, and we even started offering custom clips but some or.I should say Most of the.requests are incredibly detailed and almost impossible to do exactly as the customer wants. If Sinna or anyone else hung in there and read this long ass post I really appreciate it! Keeping in mind we don’t have much extra $$$ especially this.time of year. Is there anyone out there that has any advice or ideas to help us, so we can keep the studio open and get back to having fun making clips and making decent $$$$??????? Its hard to know if we just got lucky for a lil while? Or if my expectations are too high? I really thought most people were like me in the fetish world and LOVED AMATEUR FETISH because it feels so real and makes people feel like it could be them under the pretty girl next doors feet. We’ll never be able to have 5 beautiful models in exotic locations and a lot of the.other expensive things to create the.perfect super fantasy like the mega stores. All that being said Sinna and Any other Awesome Clips4sale success story does anyone think there’s any way at all to climb back up to the top?
Or did we just flat out get lucky for a.lil while? Sinna and all successful clips4sale studio owners who share their knowledge and experience to help others!!!! I thank you so much for being so incredibly kind, wanting to see others succeed, and helping others avoid many dangers, troubleshooting, and big costly mistakes. Thank you if you read this. I’m losing hope and need some guidance because if everything continues like this I’m gonna have to shut it all down. One last time special thanks to SINNA and any other success story trying to help.others get their lil piece of the pie.