I've been put off by clips (and web sites, too). When I read a review of how good a mistress is at spanking, which is really my only interest, and I see a video of her wearing leather and beating someone tied over a piece of furniture, I stop thinking about going over her knee for my kind of session. Or when someone lists "domestic discipline" as a specialty and all of the photos on her web site are strictly dom-fetish, there's nothing that tells me that she is able and interested in doing what I want.

I'm not a good submissive - I don't like thinking about things I don't enjoy as limits, I want to explain what I want and ask if that will work. If all I see are photos and videos of the mistress as a traditional dominatrix with whips or huge paddles, that doesn't offer me any confidence that she'll wear a skirt and spank me over her knee with her hand.

I suspect that it's true that the videos most people want to buy are of things that they don't really want to do themselves. It's like "I'm kinky, but not THAT kinky." But if I'm booking a session, I want to know that I'm booking time with someone who isn't principally an actress.

I went a couple of rounds with Irene Boss about this on Max Fisch. She made it clear that videos (at least the good ones) are scripted and everybody knows what's going to happen. That's not to say that beatings in videos aren't real, but that it's not necessarily indicitive of a live session with a client. But if the prospective client doesn't know that, he could come to the conclusion that the mistress in the video is not right for him.

It's difficult to be in both businesses where one isn't necessarily intended as advertising for the other.

(later) - Just as a benchmark, I've sessioned with a few "spanking video stars" and have not been disappointed. I think that perhaps with the exception of Miss Chris, who I first discovered through a non-commercial video clip, all of my sessions with the stars have been the case where I heard about them before seeing a video, and seeing the video helped me to decide that I really wanted to see them and that it wsn't just a fantasy. Snow Mercy, Lily Starr, and Clare Fonda come to mind.