If you want to source European adult photography for your site, you had a hard job ahead of you. Until, that is, Cool Piranha came along. Operating with adult photographers rather than as a buy low, sell low agency, Cool Piranha aim to offer high quality adult material with a slightly different look, as ROBERT TAYLOR of Cool Piranha explains….Cool Piranha
Content Maker Is King
www.coolpiranha-content.com
If you want to source European adult photography for your site, you had a hard job ahead of you. Until, that is, Cool Piranha came along. Operating with adult photographers rather than as a buy low, sell low agency, Cool Piranha aim to offer high quality adult material with a slightly different look, as ROBERT TAYLOR of Cool Piranha explains…
If you’re an adult photographer selling images to magazines around the world, what do you do with your material once the publishers have finished with it? Some glamour photographers sell their material to so many markets, the images circulate the world for years before finally coming back scratched and marked. If you’re anything like English adult photographer John Mason, you used to put them in a filing cabinet and forget about them after sales to your primary markets. Then the Internet came along, and with it the insatiable appetite for content. John dabbled in selling images to a number of companies, but few of them had an honest bone in their body, and he knew that anything he sold them would be re-sold many times over without him seeing a penny of it. Something was inherently wrong there.
The vast majority of adult content providers aren’t photographers. They don’t even have a basic grounding in the adult business, they’re just agents, hawking material around at whatever price point they think will work. Tell me, how can selling an image for 8 cents possibly help the adult market? That sort of thing isn’t economically sustainable and, as any serious photographer will tell you, if you’re paying that kind of money per image, you’re going to get images of girls that look as though they were rejects from a Dynasty casting call: big hair, 80s make-up and shoulder pads. And that’s if you’re lucky. You know what I’m talking about, just take a look at any free TGP: they’re 70s-tastic!
Something had to be done. In 15 years in the adult photography game, John has managed to shoot over 100,000 images, most of which are filed neatly in cabinets. And it was going to waste. At the start of the year, John and I sat down with a couple of other guys to form Cool Piranha Inc., a company intended to be a web solution for adult sites, host to John’s own site (www.johnmasonstudio.com) and others (www.buffythepornoslayer.com) and, more importantly, a content provider. Between us, we had nearly 25 years in the adult entertainment business, bringing editorial skills, photography and model knowledge to the party. And that’s why we started Cool Piranha Content (www.coolpiranha-content.com), a content provider with a difference. The main difference being that we don’t buy material from other photographers, we merely market it. Another difference is that all of the photographers involved are based in Europe, rather than the USA, giving the images a unique flavour. At CP Content we offer not just CD-ROMs of my images for sale, but those of other photographer based in both the UK and Europe. It’s become something like a co-operative, with photographers all contributing huge amounts of material for sale, and the site’s run transparently, so each photographer can see how well his or her material is selling, rather than just handing it over and forgetting about it.
The logic behind CP Content was simple: The Internet is awash with ‘stolen’ images, copyright infringements and people who give the word ‘slippery’ a whole new meaning. Where, we wondered, does a legitimate Webmaster go to find their adult photography without being ripped off? True, there are many good adult content providers on the web, but you know what? They’re all offering the same type of girls.
If you want a website to look individual, do you really want to buy your images from the same guy all your competitors went to? Surely there was a place on the Internet for high quality adult photography sourced from Europe, featuring a number of different styles of photography and shot by a number of different photographers?
The beauty of buying from the actual photographer via CP Content is that the purchasing Webmaster will be in no doubt that the images are legitimate, and that all the necessary model releases and rights are in place, because our paperwork is second to none. It also allows a Webmaster to tailor his site, since so many photographers shoot in so many different styles. If you want to make your site a lesbians-only site, then you can select from all of the two girl sets we’ve got, likewise gangbangs and orgy sets. It just gives you a bit more choice, and a bit more range.
For European and UK webmasters, we set out with the intention of offering a wide range of ‘known faces’; girls who would be immediately recognisable to their target markets, in much the same way that Scoreland have with their big-boobed girls. With the wealth of photographers on our books so far – and with more on the way – that’s proving to be easy. Page 3 shots (the name given to the topless photos published by the daily tabloids here in the UK) mean that we can bring European sites all of their favourite girls (Joanne Guest, Linsey Dawn McKenzie etc.), while our British photographers have an amazing amount of solo girl, girl-girl and boy-girl material ready and waiting to go. With UK adult magazine publishers currently experimenting with digital photography, many of our photographers can supply their work to us pre-scanned (John Mason has been shooting adult photography on a Nikon D1 since the camera came out), which saves us time and means we can bring their material to market even quicker.
Until now, the vast majority of content providers were based in the USA, with very little representation for – and of – European photography. The response we’ve had from big name glamour photographers in the UK leads us to believe that Cool Piranha Content (www.coolpiranha-content.com) is something a lot of people have been looking for but couldn’t find. Looks like we arrived just in time: together we can kick all those 1970s Austin Powers-style glamour shoots in the past, where they belong.
Robert Taylor
