Wow, man. I thought I was wordy.
Anywhooooo...
I think you are overthinking things a bit.
Getting a guy horny is not so tough.
Compression and size I just asked about.
Thumbs- between 120-150px length. 40%
Now it was stated that having higher quality thumbs may save you bandwidth 'cos then they'd be able to discern what not to click.
I went with 140px length but still 40% JPEG quality.
Full pics 640px length and 60% quality...I was going to use 75% but didn't see much difference and it is a free site after all.
When you mean quality do you mean actual flat sorta shitty digital dull looking pics vs eye popping glossy pics?
The actual content (model pose / lighting) can be good or bad in either style.
Are you basically asking if you should pop $40/set for free sites vs less expensive sets?
Guess it depends how many domains you can use it on and what else you could use the content for.
A thing I noticed in general with movie content is that a lot of sponsors are lazy and give away
too much in their clips. Not everyone. But many.