I downloaded a clip off two relatively new sites offering competitive novice wrestling: Green Monster Wrestling and Kick Ass Girlz (yes, with a "z"). I won't be purchasing any more soon, and here's why.
* Green Monster Wrestling, I assume that, in this business, most money you earn will come from repeat customers. You need to make sure that every clip you offer will incite the customer to purchase another one. You mustn't release something only because you filmed it. I have no idea whether the fight between Catie and Christina is representative of all your videos, but I'm not going to spend money to find out. These girls are lethargic. On one occasion, when they're both on their knees facing each other, one girl lets the other rise to her feet, take a leisurely stroll around her, and trap her in a sleeper choke. This might be customary in staged fights, but certainly not in what is genuinely intended to be a competitive wrestling bout.
* Kick Ass Girlz, you've had the good fortune to attract two gorgeous young women who actually want to fight, Ashley and Stephanie. Why then do you spoil this good fortune by several glaring mistakes, which would have cost you next to nothing to avoid:
- Please don't produce a clip where the cameraman initially announces that there will be five three-minute rounds, but where this is silently changed into three rounds during the fight itself. This is unprofessional. If the girls—first-time wrestlers?—discovered wrestling was more exhausting than they thought it would be, fine, feel free to change the rules in mid-fight, but please edit out the cameraman's announcement. I feel cheated of two rounds.
- Please maintain discipline, or at least edit the clip to make it look so. If you order the girls back down to the mat to finish off a round and they disobediently decide to take a short break instead, don't show this in the finished product. It confounds the concept of rounds.
- While on the topic of discipline, please inform the girls clearly whether it will be strictly a ground fight or whether they're allowed to rise to their feet. And please inform them before the fight, not during it.
- What fans of pin wrestling enjoy is the sight of one girl pressing the other one to the ground. You're wasting perfect opportunities when the cameraman starts a ridiculously fast countdown as soon as he spots shoulders touching ground.
- Please make sure the mat stays together in one piece. Use Velcro or something.
- And finally—although this last one would cost you some money—provide a bigger space to fight in. I'm of a nervous disposition, I just can't enjoy your clips if I need to worry about the girls cracking their skulls against a concrete wall. The cameraman really shouldn't have to be warning them during their fight.
Lotta good evaluation, imho. Fully agree with a lot of what you said. Those companies and fem wrestlers have a lot of potential, and I just hope they can get it right.
What frustrates me about the second site, Kickass Girlz, is that their problems aren't primarily a matter of resources. Not every producer can rent an entire holiday resort complex like Fightingstyle seems to have done, but when you're confined to what appears to be a 7 x 7 feet large area for wrestling, only half of which has soft mats on it, then you really need to compensate for this by making everything else perfect.
Now, their women were certainly not paid on a per-minute basis (I can tell, because there are several other women in bikinis watching and cheering in the background). It would only have cost some of the producer's time to go over the rules properly, and some further time to edit out the blemishes.
