Written by Smoke Signals | 31 October 2012

Sometimes, We Hate Being Right
SMOKE SIGNALS MAGAZINE - November - December 2012

We were recently making our rounds of various smoking fetish messageboards, sites and other gathering spots. We do it for several reasons. Of course, because in addition to publishing Smoke Signals, we're into the fetish as much as anyone else. We also want to know what people are talking about. And lastly, we have the annoying and difficult task of issuing requests to have our copyrighted material removed from file-sharing sites and the like.

This time, though, we were struck by something.

For many years, we've been preaching (some might say we've been railing) against the increasing amount of "sharing" - some, including us, would call it "stealing" - of videos that have been produced at great expense by smoking fetish companies. We've warned (some might say we've lectured) about what we thought would eventually happen, if people continued to simply *take* material from others, instead of purchasing it themselves.

Our prediction was simple: if people stopped buying, there would be less and less incentive for producers to continue making new material. Many producers would go out of business, and others would make a lot fewer videos - meaning there would be a drastic drop in the amount of new smoking fetish material available. And of the new material produced, much would be from people with smaller budgets or no experience, meaning it would be lower in quality. As you all know, the prediction about producers going out of business or producing much less material has certainly come true. But what about the rest?

Back to our recent observations on the boards. We found, to a huge extent:
1. People were largely trading old material back and forth, or posting free material readily available on sites like YouTube.
2. People were requesting old material that they'd heard about or seen at some point in the past.
3. People were complaining about the lack of new material being shot, or about the quality of new material.
4. People were still making excuses about why they wouldn't buy from established producers. There were a few exceptions, of course, but that's a pretty good summary of the bulk of the posts we read.

So, it seems to us, we weren't selling doom and gloom all those years ago when we made our predictions. We were, sadly, pretty much on the money. And we take no joy in that.

Enjoy the November-December issue!