A user's films were repeatedly taken down due to perceived policy violations, even after initial appeals, indicating a need for more accurate content review and a transparent, effective appeal system.
Storytime (yay! (not really yay)). In December 2020, The New York Times wrote an expose on P0rnhub, which apparently was doing a lot of shady things. Shady things like piracy, revenge p0rn, and CSAM. The head of Mastercard, upon reading this, told p0rnhub that they were not going to be able to use Mastercard's services for payment processing until they cleaned up their act. Other payment processors followed suit. The company that owned p0rnhub, MindGeek, had just purchased one of the largest distributors of adult entertainment on the web, Clips4Sale. The entire industry went into a panic. C4S, as people in the industry call it, started banning all sorts of content that could be considered nonconsensual such as knockout content. The producers of said content started searching for other venues to sell their wares. I know all of this, by the way, since I was researching for the two Sam Baker films I am now filming, both of which involved the Adult Fetish industry. So, the producers of content involving knockouts, bondo, etc, started landing at places like Patreon and Gumroad. Patreon quickly figured out what they were doing and instantly started kicking some of them off. Gumroad took a bit longer. I had no part in this because at the time I was selling all my Cliffhanger Productions films, which are NOT adult entertainment, through Amazon's MOD DVD distribution. Amazon did away with that program in June 2021 and quickly decided that they didn't want short films on their streaming. Films had to be at least 40 minutes long to make it to Prime Video Direct. Up until Scream a Little Dream, all my films are shorts and therefore run under 40 minutes. So I uploaded everything to Gumroad. The advantage of Gumroad is that my take was better than at Amazon. A $20 DVD of The Dangers of Deborah would only net me $5 on Amazon while the $15 Digital Download on Gumroad netted me around $12. Things were good for a few years. My films involved murder, mayhem, and peril. They also involve plots, dialogue, and sometimes lengthy scripts. Yes, Deborah Dodd gets tied up in some cliffhangers of The Dangers of Deborah, but that's not the same thing as the clown who wears a ski mask, ties and gags a woman and yells at her for 20 minutes. The heroine of Scream a Little Dream is chloroformed several times during the film but that's not the same thing as a ten-minute clip of one girl putting another in a sleeperhold repeatedly. I have nothing against the adult industry myself. Through my discussions with various members of it in the earlier part of the decade while writing my scripts, I found that they are mostly fairly normal human beings doing a job, not evil coked out degenerates out to destroy the world. I know of religious people who are eviler than some of the adult industry people I spoke to. I also have nothing against the people who wish to consume that material. I'm a 3-D fan and God knows there's quite a bit of 3-D p0rn out there. There are 3D fans begging the 3-D Film Archive to restore some of that material. For their part, the 3DFA has said that's not a very high priority of theirs. Back in December 2024, Gumroad decided to lump me in with the clowns in the ski mask yelling at the tied up girls. I pointed out that these were films, they had IMDB pages, they had screenings, etc. Gumroad backed off. Last month, they decided to pull it again and asked me to leave. They are paranoid that the credit card companies would fine them for selling my films. I tried to appeal again, but decided to hell with it. As of today, everything is being taken down from the Gumroad site. I'm moving some of the shorts to Vimeo On Demand. Mostly, the ones made in the last five years. I'm also going to put everything on Blu Ray over the next year or so. I was planning to do that anyway. The serials and the shorts will be upgraded to HD (those that aren't HD already) and repackaged for sale on Blu Ray. I will even be bringing back the long out of print Dark Avenger shorts, remastered in 3D for Blu Ray. By the way, this is as good a reason as any for you to have physical media. Amazon, for all it's faults, never looked at my stuff and refused to sell it. And by the way, Amazon has the same standards as anyone else in terms of that. TLDR: Because Amazon stopped selling MOD DVDs, I went to a site that unfortunately a lot of p0rnographers tried going to after a scandal involving p0rnhub and now that site has decided my stuff is the same as their stuff even though it isn't so I'm moving to Vimeo On Demand and reissuing everything on Blu Ray. Support physical media and don't forget to tip your wait staff,