We visit (and join – purely for professional reasons of course) good sites, some not-so-good sites, a few that annoy us, and occassionally one that makes us feel kinda ripped off. Juliland, Richard Avery’s site, is unfortunately one of the latter.
Richard Avery is a decent photographer who works with good models and has interesting ideas. Juliland is a slick, well-designed site. But what you see in the free area is — well, we can’t say it not what you get because it’s pretty much all you get. The member’s area is sparse the point of one big WTF???
It’s not just that Juliland’s webmaster or Richard Avery — whoever is in charge — only puts up 15 to 20 photos in a set. After, one of our favorite sites, X-muse.net, usually puts up about 20 featured images in a set, but to us there is a big difference: X-muse puts up what they feel are the best images, be that 20 or 16 or 35, and then they post additional images (about 50 or so on average) in case you don’t agree with their selection. More importantly however, they put up a decent selection, not a few images that look like they were just dumped from the camera in the order they were shot and posted, so that half or more are bascially the same image with minor variations.
Don’t believe us? Click to see the rest of this post below. We posted thumbnails of a two full sets to demonstrate what we mean. The second set — of Dita Von Tease — is another beef of ours with his site. In their promo material Richrd Avery makes a fairly big deal of having Dita on Juliland; what he conceals from people is that of the two sets he has, she is entirely clothed in one set and topless in only a few shots in the other.
Now we do not insist that every photo of every model feature nudity, but Juliland is a pretty hardcore site and he sells it as such in his free area so by using Dita to promote his site, he’s clearly intends to raise expectations he knows he will not fulfill. Yes, we know that Dita does not do hardcore as rule (a rule she broke for Andrew Blake) but to feature clothed shots of her on a pay site and then brag about it is deceptive.
If Juliland did what X-muse.net does (and we wish more sites did): show you the thumbnails from each set, you would know what you are getting into. But of course that would give the game away.
Now, to be fair, Juliland does have a reasonably sized video collection and the quality of the videos is overall not bad technically. If you consider Juliland to be a video site with a few boring repetitive photos thrown in as an afterthought, then the site isn’t as bad as I make it out to be. The videos are also rather boring and repetitive IMHO and the sound tracks are kind of obnoxious, but your mileage may vary.
So, no we aren’t going to link to Juliland. If you are curious, by all means check it out and join if you are a fan of Richard Avery or like small repetitive photo sets and boring videos shot with good technical quality.
Otherwise, we suggest that you stay away from juliland.com.
(more…)