Sure I remember too not long ago no one put any watermark on the release. Coincidentally, that was the time the Chinese netizens didn't "pollute" our waters because no one would have the bandwidth to download the 700+ MB files that we were using. (notice the disappearance of small RMVB files nowadays) Now Chinese are downloading the SD and HD files the same as us. And we are stuck with the ads targeted to them.
Look I too take a few minutes before each download to avoid, if possible, the yellow (sometimes white) multiline watermarks, have been doing it ever since I saw it for the first time. And I bet a lot of AV fans (including the Chinese) are doing the same. I really don't think "boycotting" the bad watermarks would have any impact on the watermark scene. They don't get "encouraged" by the number of downloads, if it works that way, the behaviour of all of us would have stamped out watermark entirely already. They get incentivized by people browsing to those sites and spending money there.
I really don't know how the watermark economy works... but no matter what the main problem is lack of competitors. Actually I am starting to have a strong suspicion where most of the AV "leak" into the internet, I'm not saying where or who (anyway it's just my pet theory) but I'm pretty sure the English-speaking world isn't in the loop. So whatever we say or complain here doesn't make a damn difference to everyone (no matter his role) in the AV universe.
Curiously... the above doesn't apply to hentai... for whatever reason the English speaking world has a role in hentai manga and anime, both legit and pirated.
Though unlike ding73ding I have less of an issue with the yellow watermark releases and more with the chinese ad lady versions, because the former usually have pretty good quality for SD rips, but the chinese lady rips, like I said earlier, don't only suffer from terrible image quality, the encoding is full of video and audio glitches.
Curious, I have not noticed any worse quality of the Chinese ad lady compared to the yellow watermark. I've just recently downloaded a Chinese ad lady version of BAXZ-021 to replace a yellow watermark version I downloaded earlier. I have to trim off the the first 40+ seconds to get rid of the ad (which tends to wake up the whole house despite I always watch AV with the volume low). And then I did a quick eyeball check for quality. I won't go into details here, anyway my rather quick comparison decided that the Chinese ad version quality is not worse, while the semi-transparent one-line watermark is a lot less annoying than the opaque and loud yellow 3-lines watermark.
This is the only vid I can do an apple-to-apple comparsion. And sorry I deleted the yellow version so I can't offer a detail side-by-side comparsion.
You're right. Who has the time other than those idiots to sustain what they do. It would be 24/7 work, really. At least...if you were trying to get everything out as zero-day releases like they do.
