PLEASE READ: Piracy, it's affect on Grooby and YOU!
I don't want this to be a long lecture on piracy, downloads, the internet and the legalites or morality of downloading porn from stolen content websites. Pretty much everybody has done it in some form or another and it's part of the current format of the internet.
What I do want to do, is introduce some ideas to you as well as the direction we are now put in a position to take, to ensure the longevity of our business and to protect the employees and owners of the company.
While there has always been people getting free passwords, or sharing content, never has there been such a wholesale theft of material, which is then sold for profit. We've certainly seen the effects on our bottomline and whilst we don't seem to be as affected as many other companies (some which are already out of business) without taking steps and measures, I have to wonder, how long we can continue to produce at this level.
It's a common misnomer that these "pirates" and their sites, are just fan sites out to share their own love of this content with other like minded fans. They are not. All file sharers and filesharing companies, get paid and make a lot of illegal money. The uploader to a Rapidshare type site, get's paid when somebody upgrades to a premium download membership, the forum and blog style sites make their money from advertising and the download sites get payments to let a thief illegally download the content. Nobody is doing this for fun - it's an organised business, much of it originating in Russia, China and Eastern Europe.
Many people believe that downloading content from websites is mainly a victimless crime, or the few "rich porn producers" somehow deserve to make less. There are a number of flaws with this approach for our company. We've been operating for nearly 15 years. Many of the photographers and support staff have been with us for nearly that time and these are their full time jobs. We keep employed over 20 full time employees worldwide in various roles, we have numerous part time photographers and support staff and we have the auxilliary employment that comes from that; printers, distributors, affiliates, cleaners, drivers, etc. Many of our employees also are partners or profit sharing from our sales.
We pay transgender models over $700,000 every year in model fees alone.
It doesn't matter what your opinion is of me personally, or the business I chose to be in - without the revenue coming in, jobs will be lost, production budgets will be cut and fans of tgirl porn will suffer from less production.
Our website's are not cheap. I appreciate in these difficult times, that $25-$35 a month is a lot of money. I believe our sites represent good value for money, for what we deliver but in order to try and cater to an ever changing market, we have made some changes in the last year by adding a value pack, releasing the sites for as little $20 a month at our ticket system.. We've also brought in a "cherry pick" system, where you can pick and choose exactly which scenes you want to see at our Buddy Wood, PK Vegas & Shemale Pornstar VOD site which we may extend to other sites.
We're looking for new ways to bring extra value to your website membership and have just started adding extra full scenes to each website weekly, to allow you to see extra sets from other sites. We are also working on a loyalty program and a few other extras which we hope will enhance your time spent on our sites.
When you join a site, you are getting the updates as they are released and years of back content. You are getting the sets that the models and the photographers wanted you to see and you are contributing to more shoots. We are the only company of it's type which allows direct feedback on all it's websites, to the photographers and webmasters and from this feedback, we will try to adjust and tweak the sites to our members requirements. If you have technical or speed problems with the website, we will try and fix it - at admin@grooby.com
This is an appeal to you all. Whether current or ex-members, or those who have yet to join a website to please think about what you are doing when downloading stolen content. It's not victimless. The victims are the people working on the sites and the models whom you love to watch.
This post is also to inform you because of the untenable position that we've been put in, about actions we are taking to protect our company, the employees, the members and the models.
1. Members are encouraged to download material, keep it and enjoy it for as long as they wish. We have no time limitations written into our material. However, you may not upload it to any file sharing or bittorrent site whatsoever. Anybody found to be doing so, will have legal action taken against them for compensation.
2. Anybody found to be downloading stolen content from any of our websites, will also have legal action taken against them. We have the technical ability to track stolen downloaded content and we will have no choice but to instruct our lawyers to take that action, in an effort to recoup lost revenue.
Any form of legal action is costly, both to our company and the offending parties. We will only take legal action against parties which our lawyers are confident of winning. Other parties illegally downloading our content may find themselves open to other actions, including media publication and announcements.
I'd like to thank all our members and supporters over the years and for your continued support. We will continue to do what we do best, in producing unique and original transsexual content. We will listen to your concerns, your feedback and your wants and try and cater to them. I am confident that the majority of you will understand what I aim to accomplish with this message and what we as a business and as a group of fans of this material, need to do, to survive through the next decade.
Thank you.
Steven
CEO
Grooby Productions
