If your goal is to sell things -- then give the people what they want. Actually, giving people what they need is a better approach. An astute seller can predict what's needed before the public knows they want it (or at least convince them that they need something they didn't know they wanted). There are pathfinders and path followers and the first one makes the most money. The follower just has an easier time convincing somebody else that it's worth taking that same road to get funding. Using the movie analogy, "Star Wars" was by no means an easy sell. Watch the documentary that came with the original trilogy of films or check out one of the books on the making of the first movie. The most successful science fiction movie, prior to "Star Wars" was "2001" and that only made around $20 million from an initial $10 million cost (I'm too lazy to look up the exact figures right now, so feel free to correct them) at the time "Star Wars" was being planned. From any practical standpoint, nobody involved in "Star Wars" expected to top the most successful scifi movie up to that point in time. The only way "Star Wars" got its initial run was for theaters to take it with another movie that Fox expected to be the big film of the year. At that point in time, science fiction was a niche movie genre that wasn't a major moneymaking field unless it was very low budget. "Star Wars" by no means was something the mainstream public was craving to see. Nor was the public anxiously awaiting to see a movie based on old serials, but "Raiders of the Lost Ark" became another blockbuster. It wasn't an easy sell pushing a comedy about a bigot on TV, but Norman Lear succeeded with "All in the Family". You can essentially take any trend and find the seminal moment when a creative talent put something out to the public that it wasn't expecting and did it well enough that the public craved more. There are a lot of less creative folks at the tail end of a trend that lose their shirts when the public finds something else they'd rather have and somebody new is giving it to them. Although some of the same principles apply to Poser content, the other difficult thing to get past is marketing. Movies and TV shows have high visibility and buzz before they come out. I'm always amazed when I see a paid commercial for something like the last "Star Wars" and "Lord of the Rings" movies because the money didn't have to be spent. There was better free publicity for those films on TV news, entertainment, and talk shows, the net, and everywhere else. Poser is a much smaller area of interest and even the biggest Poser events go comparatively unnoticed by users who aren't wired into one of the forums. Creating that new must-have Poser content is only half the battle--marketing it successfully is that larger part of getting it sold. I can sympathize with Davo (post 120) when he has to let DAZ keep 50% of his sales earnings at their site, but he sold more than ten times as many copies as he sold on his site and made five times as much money even after letting DAZ keep half of what was sold. As much as it eats at the soul to let an outside entity profit from one's creative endeavors, that's basically the way it is everywhere from movies to books to selling physical goods. There are agents, publishers, and distributors taking a cut from the artist's creative wares. At least most Poser content providers get to keep the rights to their works unless they sell them outright to somebody. Try to find a CD where the singer retains the copyright. It's a shame that creative talents have to give money to businessmen that sell their products, but it's not an unusual practice and, in most creative venues, keeping 50% is very good. [this site shows a CD royalties rate of 16%, http://www.ascap.com/musicbiz/money-recording.html and here's one showing 10% royalties for a book, http://www.llumina.com/royalty.htm] Getting 50% at DAZ doesn't so so onerous anymore. Whatever anybody wants to say about DAZ, they're out there trying to increase the Poser market. The more Poser/DAZStudio users there are, the more products will be sold and there will be more content. DAZ has sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into providing a free posing/rendering program to entice new users. I can't recall seeing any other company trying to increase the market awareness for Poser content to that degree. I'm stunned when I occasionally read posts here about how that's a horrible thing. I know that DAZ is doing it to increase their sales, but I can't imagine that any content provider would consider introducing new artists to Poser as being a bad thing.

My visual indexes of Poser content are at http://www.sharecg.com/pf/rgagnon