Monday, May 20, 2013

Commissions Purchased BY Me For My Sites: Hard to do



 I've had a couple of requests from members of strongandstacked for me to commission artists for material to be put on to the website.  I'm not talking about people asking me to do commissions for them.  Rather I'm talking about people requesting that I commission third party artists to create material for Strong and Stacked

Now I'm not completely averse to doing it - but I have done it in the past and I figured it's worth explaining that given the relatively small profit margin that exists for my websites, its tough for me to commission other artists to create material for the website.  Not impossible, but tough.
Stone3D Muscle Girl

Stone3D FMG Sequence
THE ECONOMICS OF IT

I wrote a post a while back about the economics of running my websites http://strongandstacked.blogspot.com/2013_02_01_archive.html .  Looking at what I've been getting lately per month - I make about 350 dollars or so per month.  Not retiring on that any time soon certainly :)  But its a nice little augmentation to my day job income

Now when commissions of third party artists come into the picture, they eat up a substantial chunk of that 350 dollars.  And that's what makes it hard.  I think what I can do is save up a certain budget for commissions and try to pay for one every few months .  But given the income level of the site I just can't do it very often 

Stone3D Muscle Girl
OTHER SITES

I don't know how other sites manage to do this more often.  Maybe they just have a far larger base of members and also they charge more for their site.

Take a site like Amy's Conquest http://amysconquest.com .  From what I can tell, that site is purely driven via artwork etc that the site owner commissions from other people.  I myself have created some content for that site in the past. 
Now its true that there is some very impressive drawn art on that site.  The monthly fee for that site as of this writing is 19.99 per month.  There must be an impressive member base though to keep that website afloat.  Because commissioning all that artwork that fills up the site is not cheap.

Another example is Bad Girls Art http://www.badgirlsart.com/ .  Again, I believe that site is filled with content purely commissioned by the site owner.  Well, except for the text in the comics. I think the owner commissions artists to do the artwork, then he writes the dialogue in the comics .  I absolutely love some of the artwork on the website.  That combination of big muscles and humongous tits.  But I'm sure it doesn't



Loernor Muscle Girl
Stone3D Boob Girl
Stone3D Muscle Girl




 come cheap to commission.  And again, the site is charging more than I am.  24 USD per month. 

Also I noticed that badgirlsart forked off a separate site bga-library.com where they move older material.  So they only keep a subset of the newest stuff on badgirlsart.com - if you want access to the archived older material, you have to sign up for a completely separate site bga-library.com.  Maybe doing that generates enough income for the site owner to be able to afford commissions.

Now contrast those two examples of sites with purely commissioned content with something like Tigersan's Fem Power Xtreme.  Tigersan is the sole content creator there.  He doesn't have to commission anybody.  So he saves a lot of money by just creating the stuff himself.  I'm in a similar situation.  Well, I should clarify.  I'm nowhere near as talented as Tigersan is at creating sculpted custom muscle women and exquisite renders.  He is a real virtuoso at all of that.  But where we are similar is that we create the content for our own sites.

In my case, unlike Tigersan, I have commissioned SOME artwork in the past.  It's probably worth discussing that

COMMISSIONS I'VE BOUGHT

So my primary go to guy in the past for commissions has been Stone 3D.  And if I start commissioning content for the site again, he's the first person I'll definitely contact.  As a side note, if you want to commission him for anything, check out his deviant art page at http://stone3d.deviantart.com

Stone has created several fantastic comics for my website.  And at a very reasonable price.  However, given the slim profit margin I described above, I haven't been able to come up with money to commission him for anything recently.

It's certainly not his fault.  He never overcharges me and has incredibly reasonable rates.  Its on my end of things - I end up using the modest profits from the site to do a few things.  Some of it is investing in software and tools/models I use for content.  Some of it is just paying my monthly bills...

But at the end of the day, I just haven't had a lot of cash lately to spend on commissions.  Given that I've had requests specifically for more stuff from Stone, I plan to try to carve out some piece of the budget to commission him soon.  But its not easy for me given where the finances are

Now Stone has been by far the most prolific commissioned creator of content for strongandstacked.com in the past.  But I have occasionally turned to other artists/creators.

I've commissioned Saxxon before to create some line art.  He's very talented, but I found that given my budget I could afford like 5 line drawings in a month.  That's it.  I ended up kind of putting them into one of my comics.  But it just wasn't enough content for the site for me to justify to myself being able to pay for it in the future.

Femfortefan is another artist I've commissioned, and like Saxxon, he's very talented.  But again, I was finding I could afford like 6 drawings in a month. 

I commissioned a few other artists too, but in the end I decided Stone3D made the most sense for amount of content created per dollar spent.  He does fantastic stuff too.  I know that he was cutting me a bit of a break on his rates, and in return I've tried to promote his stuff and his deviant art page on my site.

I may commission him again in the near future but like I said I'll need to save up to do that

No comments:

Post a Comment