Lets talk about this whole Celestia Vega thing. She has garnered quite a bit of commentary….She looks like a prepubescent boy being one of the more common….While it may be borderline mean, the point porners should be paying attention to is that these are your CUSTOMERS speaking…and they are telling you that YER DOING IT WRONG! Now I got no complaints about Miss Vega except that she isnt going about this in a very smart way.
In Marketing she is what you would call a micro niche, she has limited appeal, the whole androgeny thing has its fans but they arent a large enough market for say Digital Playground to make money on it. She has done a great job branding herself and creating a fan base she is a PRIME Candidate for doing her own clips store on Clips4sale and or manyvids. She owns her content and makes money on it forever, and instead of turning her niche fanbase over to porn she keeps it for herself and monetizes it in a MUCH lager way. Without subjecting herself to the misogyny and the STD Petri dish that is Porn Valley. She would make WAY more money, after all she already did the hard part, she built a fan base, a fan base that for the most part will not follow her to Porn Valley, dont believe me ask Kendra Sunderland….
Im not bashing Ms Vegas looks, like I said theres an ass for every seat, to me she looks like the girl taking Axe’s place on the TV show Billions. She should take advantage of what she has already done.
On the flip side you have Porn Valley who are apparently just as ignorant from a business standpoint….I mean is this really a coup? Is this what you wanna bank your investment on? Is this where porn is headed? The bar for performers has dropped drastically over the last 20 years as have production values, and your customers are asking you WTF and your answer is “Don’t Hate”?
And you wonder why your “gaping asshole” movies aren’t selling? Might it be because YOU are the gaping assholes? Im talkin to you John, and you Jules, you guys lost 75% of your market but you pat yourselves on the back because the 25% you didn’t lose is saying yes give us more gaping assholes, more misogyny, more homoerotic porn….
And to Celestia Vega….it isnt too late to set your course straight, you wont be given avn awards but youll be able to buy the companies that win all the big awards with your pocket change…..You have already done the hard part….working in Porn Valley is the dumbest thing you could do.
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The same thing applies to tattoos. Girls pile on the tats and then wonder why they are losing fans and not getting the shoots they want. Ask fans whats the #1 thing they hate in porn and its tattoos on the girls followed by douchy males that think the scene is all about them (Kiernan Lee, Manuel Ferreira, James Deen, Danny D, and a few others get tons of hate on forums for that).
Mike, you make many good points. Celeste could probably make more money producing her own content. Maybe she will as soon as she can afford everything she needs to do it (I don’t know but I that could be her plan anyway, many performers are going that route). She might make YT videos but good enough for YT won’t cut it for adult film (even Clips 4 Sale). If she does it right, doing a few porn scenes might get her name further out there and increase her income when she does start producing her own content. I also agree that there is a limited market for such product lines as Jules’ “Ass Cream Man” and John’s “let’s shove a speculum, a garden gnome, a lead pipe and an AIDS infested fist up these poor performer’s asses”. However, I have to disagree with most on Celeste’s “look”. I think the only flaw in her appearance is the lack of hair on top of her head. She has a beautiful face, a beautiful body and doesn’t have a bunch of jail tattoos. Admittedly I think she would look great wriggling around with her hands tied behind her or in a hogtie but if that isn’t her thing I am fine with it. I think she will do fine whether she remains in the Chatsworth adult film industry or uses it as a jumping off point for her own content. Supposedly she has a YT following but I hadn’t heard of her before yesterday. For the time being she just needs to invest in a few nice wigs (Aaliyah Hadid does the wig thing, she is even more bald than Celeste without one of her wigs on — and Aaliyah seems to be doing fine in adult film).
“YER DOING IT WRONG” says the guy no longer in business to Derek Hay and all of LA Direct’s producer clIents. I’m certain they will all abruptly change course now that Mike South has issued his counsel.
And I’m sure Celeste will love the Christian missionary style passive aggression: “You’ve just made the dumbest decision of your life, and you look like a little boy (and you’re a micro niche with only tiny tiny appeal) but you’re still terrific and special and meant for great things!”
After reading this gem, I am left wondering why anyone ever thought Mike South only had negative, insulting, bitter or angry things to say about the adult business….
MHARRIS She certainly has the equipment and the editing abilty ( or someone with her does) and she would make way more money, both short and long term with a clips store, there was a time when starting in porn would work, Joanna Angel has done it for instance but now porn would work against her financially, because she will be competing with herself….on her own she can follow the golden rule of marketing yourself, leave them wanting more, and she can stretch her longevity indefinitely and she can control her content….she will be all over the tubesites shooting in porn valley her customer base will get her for free and she will be paid peanuts With Clips4sale she has a good ally to keep her content OFF the free sites, C4S will use their attorneys to police her content for her, it isnt perfect but its way better.
Look at it this way, she has a solid fan base if she does one clip and sells it for 10 bucks and sells 1000 of them, which given her base she could likely do she makes 10 TIMES or more what she will make for one scene in porn. if she does one scene a week and paces her releases and what she does she makes serious money, the kind of money she will only make in porn valley if she starts hooking, and even at that she would have to become VERY popular….
and even the exposure isnt that big of a deal…in the 90s there were about 14000 video stores across the country, the average release would sell 3000 to 5000 copies in the first 30 days now even Evil Angel doesnt sell 1000 copies of a new release, video stores have closed or moved to novelties because people dont rent videos anymore, on the other hand Neil Orkin could buy Evil Angel Video with a single months profits…easily…(Orkin owns C4S) and whats an AVN cover worth? nothing..AVN only goes out to retailers the average Joe on the street doesnt know the names of any porn chicks because theres a plethora of them, they are in and out so quickly and unless you have fucked the President nobody in mainstream cares about you because you arent news…you arent even a curiosity anymore so there is simply NO upside to doing porn. It wasnt always this way but it is now, anyone who made good porn has long since left because they saw the writing on the wall…Vivid doesnt release videos and hasnt in years, theres a reason for that….Ms Vega has the opportunity to do very well for herself but if she does it via porn valley she will be long forgotten in a year or two and the only thing she will have to show for it is Herpes and a shitload of free scenes of her on tubesites.
Thats why so many porn girls escort, there is no more money in mainstream porn. Not to mention paying for regular testing also cuts into their profits.
If Celeste has the equipment and the cash to keep herself afloat until her C4S, ManyVids, et. al. start selling (her past YT venture may help in this if they don’t cut off her advertising revenue as revenge for getting into what they feel is a scourge on society) I agree that she should produce her own content. I was acknowledging the grim reality that most do not when entering the porn business. I think she is cute and if she plays her cards right she will do quite well.
I do have one question, though. Now that Celeste is signed with Derek Hay/LA Direct, does he get a piece of her clip store revenue? That is one concern I would have signing an agency contract in the current business environment. Unless Derek can help her with scenes she produces herself (providing camera and editing equipment would be two biggies, providing filming locations would be another) he shouldn’t get a piece of that revenue. She could have signed with much worse than Derek Hay (Tee Reel/Ideal Image and Riley Reynolds/Hussey Models are two that come to mind) but I do agree that mainstream porn is declining. I think things should shake out over the next few years, leaving a few of the stronger companies to thrive (my money would be on New Sensations — which is told to be still making a profit even with business as bad as it is right now, Greg Lansky’s websites and probably Evil Angel surviving) but things are very dicey in pornland right now.
I’ve only seen her with long hair, at least on all her very popular social media accounts. I only came across her because I was researching “celeb” cam girls and women with high social profiles who do camming or porn, and happened to come across her announcement of her first porn scene. Guess I didn’t do THAT much research but this is the first I’ve seen of her short hair and supposed boyish look. Body doesn’t look boyish to me, it may not be “thicc” but it’s feminine.
I can only speak to the picture here, but looks small, delicate and lovely. While I agree with your assessment that she should capitalize on her fan base and avoid the valley, it’s certainly not because she’s some extreme niche.