Clips4Sale is the latest major porn brand to join the monthly-subscription club.
Its new premium service, C4S+, wraps a streaming subscription around a selection of videos from the site’s famously kinky community of amateur creators. For $14.99 per month, you can access one of the world’s largest fetish libraries.
The familiar clip store isn’t going anywhere. C4S+ is an additional subscription, which makes this a rather interesting experiment…
If you’ve spent any time with our Adult VOD coverage, you’ll recognise that it was also somewhat inevitable.
Adult network operators all over the world are rushing to consolidate their libraries into accessible Netflix-style passes – it’s simply what the consumer now expects:
One low price for reams of content.
Clips4Sale is a different beast, though. For starters, its content doesn’t come from a handful of licensing agreements. It is a clip marketplace for specialist creators. The economics of such an arrangement depends on creators being happy to support a Spotify-style split.
It’s a difficult conundrum to solve: can C4S present a VOD product with “good value” without making the people behind the videos worse off?
The more attractive you make the subscription… the more you risk cannibalising the clip sales that keep creators on the platform.
In our view, it all depends on what goes into the subscription, what stays paywalled, and – crucially – how much of that monthly fee actually reaches creator pockets.
What Does a C4S+ Subscription Include?
Quite a lot!
C4S+ is not launching with a slow dribble.
It’s going live with more than 100,000 videos from over 1,000 studios, plus new videos added daily, and an ad-free streaming experience.
The service had a creator introduction in July, followed by its wider launch announcement in September.
During that time, Clips4Sale has been encouraging creators to opt in to the service, with the incentive that viewers who watch their included clips will be more likely to pay for other items in their libraries.
We’ve heard this argument before, and it’s already under attack (as we’ll see below). Either way, the 100,000 videos on C4S+ is still a tiny fraction of the 8 million plus clips on the main Clips4Sale marketplace.
With C4S+, only the streaming selection is included. Other clips can still appear in C4S+ as locked listings, with a separate purchase required at the creator’s normal price. Even creators who haven’t put anything into the streaming pool can have their clips displayed this way, which is said to be an intentional part of the new discovery model.
You can see what C4S is going for.
In a perfect world, a subscriber discovers a creator through an included video, then spots something else in their catalogue worth buying. The monthly fee gets them through the door; the shop is still very much open.
From the customer’s side, though, there’s an obvious irritation to avoid. The very reason why so many networks are trying to crowbar their content into a single monthly pass is because users don’t want to keep reaching for their wallets.
Finding a price tag on the clip that caught your eye feels rather different once you’ve already paid for a subscription, right?
The distinction between available to browse and included to stream needs to be unmistakable.
Downloads are another separate expense. Despite the site’s talk of keeping your favourites, the FAQ clearly states that downloads cost extra.
This positioning makes C4S+ a strange hybrid by adult VOD standards.
It isn’t an all-you-can-eat pass like the network subscriptions it’s competing with, and it isn’t the old clip store either. It’s a lean middle ground: a subscription with a shop window. If it works, C4S gets recurring revenue and a discovery engine that sends new buyers to creators.
The downside is that… if it doesn’t, it risks annoying subscribers who feel nickel-and-dimed, as well as creators who feel undercut… and potentially losing both.
How Are Creators Reacting To The News?
Understandably, many C4S creators are wary about the introduction of a feature that could cannibalise their earnings.
We’re already seeing complaints on Reddit:
Feeling very worried about the future of C4S. They launched C4S+ this month and my sales are down nearly 30%. Re-enrolled in C4S+ just to see, but very low hopes that it will fill that gap. Also had to opt-out many of my best selling videos, as well as most of my video bundles, since they automatically opted those in themselves. Not cool at all.
via The future of Clips4Sale and what is next.
Another user responds:
I have received messages already from past buyers on C4S asking if we were going to be putting out clips on C4S+ so they dont have to buy them anymore! They think it’s awesome that they can just watch all the content for virtually nothing. We told them we have no plans to post on C4S+ and prefer to just have people buy our clips.
I’m unclear why any of my fellow sellers want to put their clips on C4S+ which is essentially giving them away and zeroing out all sales.
My question to the company was how much you earn per minute of your clip watched and the answer is “we’re not sure. It will depend what the platform earns and then we will decide at the end of each month whst different creators will get!“
It’s all just insane.
via The future of Clips4Sale and what is next.
It’s not just the implications for the bottom line.
Creators are also nervous about piracy.
Clips4Sale famously brands itself as the “Fort Knox of amateur content” – and that’s largely due to the nature of the previous model. To leak a library, someone had to buy it clip by clip.
Any vice-like handle on leaked content is immediately compromised by a streaming model (with a free trial option) where a single bad actor can walk into the vault and help themselves.
C4S+ is said to be taking steps to minimise this risk, but whether it’s technically plausible is another thing altogether:
Other creators are taking a pragmatic approach to the move. They are detaching any loyalty to C4S via a carpet-bombing approach to the other clip sites:
My strategy is to have all my clips on as many sites as I can. That way whenever one site does some dumb shit like this, it doesn’t really affect me. I use MV, C4S, IWantClips, APClips, OF, Fansly, Loyalfans, Sheer, Faphouse. I’m working on uploading my catalogue to Yourvids, then next will be Hidden and Clips dot com. It’s a lot of sites, but I literally only post clips, nothing else, so for me it’s manageable.
Reddit user, Clara_dee
She adds that C4S is only responsible for 32% of her total earnings – ManyVids (30%) and OnlyFans (12%) also contribute a decent chunk.
For the best part of two decades, Clips4Sale has enjoyed a loyalty most platforms would kill for. Plenty of fetish producers built entire businesses on the site… and this was long before OnlyFans reinvented the “creator economy”.
C4S+ is the first real test of that loyalty.
The C4S Strength Is the Creator Catalogue
To truly understand why C4S+ is such a gamble, we have to understand what Clips4Sale actually is.
It launched in 2003 as one of the first places where independent creators and studios could sell individual clips straight to the consumer.
While Aylo and the major tube sites were busy gutting the traditional studio model, C4S grew a huge following by building the exact opposite: a marketplace where people paid for exactly what they wanted… one clip at a time.
What they wanted was usually rather specific, and today it is showcased by the site’s tagline: “NO VANILLA!”.
It’s not just marketing jargon. Fetish and kink have always been the site’s bread and butter. Its eight-million-clip library spans a huge treasure trove of niche fantasies and taboo interests.
These aren’t typically fetishes a mainstream network would invest heavily in licensing. They’re the kinks where a single creator might serve a few thousand devoted buyers worldwide… but those same buyers will happily pay for a clip nobody else makes.
That unrivalled depth has made C4S something of a cultural barometer.
Way back in 2015, The Guardian scraped metadata from over 4.8 million C4S clips to show how fetish categories had grown since 2003. Vice has repeatedly turned to the latest Clips4Sale data for its reporting on alternative porn trends.
As a general rule, if a journalist wants to know what the masses are secretly into this year, they don’t ask Pornhub. They ask C4S.
Much of the success behind C4S has been down to the simplicity of its model.
Creators have full license to run their own storefronts and set their own prices, while the platform takes care of the distribution and payment processing in the background. At the time of writing, creators keep 60% of standard clip sales and 80% of tips… and the platform also handles custom-video orders (a lucrative side hustle for many C4S creators).
That 60% is worth pausing on, too.
It’s much less generous than the 80% creators have come to expect from other well-known fan platforms, and yet many have stuck with C4S for years. Why? The community is stacked with lucrative buyers.
C4S has a ready-made audience of paying fetish customers. So, the question is whether this move towards a mainstream-friendly streaming package will rock the boat.
Could C4S+ Work for Amateur Creators?
We think it can, but only for creators who treat it as a marketing tool rather than an outright replacement for the clip store.
Most creators are already sitting on a huge back catalogue of content. They have a long tail of older clips that barely sell any more, so why not try and leverage them for more exposure?
Putting those clips into a streaming pool costs very little, and it might just put the creator in front of subscribers who’d never have found them viaa the conventional discovery tools.
Sex is a funny business, after all. Many punters don’t know they like “the thing” until they’re exposed to “the thing”. And if “the thing” previously cost ten bucks to watch, chances are they’d never find “the thing”.
Well… now they might.
A streaming model *could* potentially expand a creator’s overall reach.
Some of those viewers might go on to buy the newer work, order customs or tip. It’s too early to say whether this is actually happening on the platform.
For creators who work out how to game the streaming platform for maximum exposure, it might add a second revenue stream in the form of “streamed minutes”.
The problem is that almost everything that makes the idea work for creators… is completely unknown.
Creators haven’t been told how much a streamed minute is worth, and C4S seems to be implying that it’ll decide once the month’s money is calculated. So, in other words: it’s a royalty system where the early adopters are flying blind.
Until C4S gets some actual data, every creator who opts in is betting on numbers they can’t see.
To this extent, the company has made some cutthroat decisions that won’t have endeared it to many creators – for one, automatically opting creators’ best-sellers and bundles in without the ability to block premium content in advance.
A discovery model built on trust is off to a shoddy start when creators have to log in and opt-out their best work from an audience of potential freeloaders.
And, of course, there’s the cannibalisation risk we started with. If loyal buyers would rather wait for a creator’s clips to land in C4S+ than pay for them now… it’s hard to see how the subscription is growing the pie. The behavioural economics are not to be messed with here.
If C4S trains its customers to expect more and more clips for just $14.99/month (or a free trial), creators will be faced with the inevitable choice of “cave in, or get passed over“.
Some will vote with their feet and take content to rival platforms.
Either way, the shake-out will be fascinating to watch.
The first few months of payouts will likely decide whether C4S+ is seen as a solid second income for fetish creators… or yet another harsh lesson in platform risk.
