Paysite Pricing: How it affects sales?

it depends on the content

Let's leave it to Roger to answer the technical questions. We'll let you do what you do best, which is start meaningless threads and whore a sig.

the relationship is not linear with "porn" because porn is not a commodity that can easily be compared.

and for many, low priced smut connotes less exciting, less current, less state of the art technically, etc. and only because of the low price will be less attractive to the surfer.

many have found that lowering the price does not give greater signups unless the price is VERY low ($1 signup, etc.).

truth is, every time i've raised pricing the signups are relatively the same.
that reminds me, time to raises prices again.

price points have a major effect on paysites...

Depends on a lot of factors. I really don't think promoting the same tour for $1or $4.99 is really going to generate that many more sign-ups. You might get some but i'm not sure if that's offset by the lower payouts.

Also if a surfer took tours of 2 different sites in the same niche he is not necessarily going to sign up for a $1 trial over $4.99 trial. If the tour for the $4.99 trial is more enticing then he'll choose that one.

Also there is the recurring amount. All things being equal I would guess that a tour with a trial of $4.99 that recurs at $24.95 a month would get more sign-ups than one with a $1 tour that recurs at $39.99. Even if the surfer has no intentions of recurring at the time he signs up I'm almost sure it would still play a factor in his head.

good point.

Depends on how exclusive and quality your content is. If its really good shit not available elsewhere, sky's the limit for pricing. Also, if you have a really great free tour - that helps justify a higher asking price.

No they dont.

A paysite membership is an impulse buy, therefore, surfers rarely (if ever) comparision shop for the best price they can find, if they did, all those $10 membership sites companies launched a year or two back would be the industry standard and, the simple fact is, they arent.

Im always hearing webmasters say that price and quality is what makes a surfer buy a membership to a site and, im sorry but thats bullshit. Surfers buy a membership to a paysite because they think one {or more} of the models in use on the tour is hot, nothing more, nothing less.

Price however, does have a major effect on paysite owners but, thats a different thread all together.

Regards,

Lee

Your replies pretty much align with my research as well. About 6 months ago, I dropped my prices from $24.99 to $14.99, expecting a spike in sales. Looking over my paychecks from before the price change, my revenue is currently less than half what it was before.

It would appear to me, that a paysite purchase is indeed an impulse buy where price takes little consideration. A higher price may even make a site a more attractive purchase.

Check out all the pricing options we offer webmasters to promote:

http://www.pimproll.com/programs.html

From $1 trials to $9.99 monthly.

Never thought I would ever agree with you lol

bingo, a guy holding his dick in one hand and his CC in the other, is very unlikely to spend two hours searching for similar site and choosing the cheapest one

I've worked on a site that tried three different price points: $14.95, $19.99 and $29.99. The higher price point seems to generate the most sales. Our guess is, that some surfers evaluate a product partly on the price: higher price "means" better quality. That's not to say it's actually true, and even less to say there's not a cut-off point. The members also stayed, on average, about 1.5 - 1.75 months, regardless of price. So you have to take that into account as well, when judging price points.

Take a site at $10 per month with a decent join rate and retention rate of 2 months. Compare it to a site at $30 / month with a better than decent join rate and retention rate of 1-1.5 months.

Just takes time fucking with the numbers and arriving at your own solution I guess. I don't think there's a magical price for any site.

I'm torn on this post.

The thought that surfers are sitting at their computers with their dick-in-their-hand, credit-card-in-the-other has been around for a decade. I'm not sure if it's still that much a reality.

For one, porn's pretty much desaturated over the internet now. It's everywhere, easy to find and for those types of people who would sit at their computer with their dick-in-their-hand viciously waiting to jerk off, porn is readily available from google to find for free and jerk off to.

I'm not saying the theory doesn't still exist, but it just seems a bit off: If you're ready and willing to jerk, you'll do it at the drop of a hat, at the first thing that arouses you. There's enough free porn showing up in search results to accommodate that, and NOT paysites.

I have no numbers and could be talking out of my ass, but I think those that join paysites are looking for more of a dedicated path for delivery -- much like that dealer that's always available to deliver the goods that you want, when you want it. We all know there's thousands of shitty paysites that get tons of joins over hundreds of quality sites that get a ton fewer joins. The only reason is because the shitty sites somehow convinced the user they were the "better" dealer.

I see what you are saying because recently this happend with a site i was promoting. The site actually converted better at full membership then trial, but 99.9% of time cheap trials convert better for me.

like others said, signing up for a porn site is an impulse (most of the time), BUT a 1$ trial helps

if pricing points didn't matter we could all get away with no trials. trial prices and recurring prices do make a difference.

Bingo.

As always - content is king. If you got the exclusive goods, don't hesitate to ask the bucks for it. Do a little research and see what comparable sites are asking...and weigh it against your intuition.

bump for a good business thread...

I have to disagree with you. The surfer, by the time he reaches the paysite, is quite likely already jerking off - to the free porn he got while surfing. The paysite has to grab his attention by offering something the free porn he was looking at did not have. Higher quality, the prospect of long videos, that really hot girl he saw in the gallery, no more blind links, etc. If his desire is strong enough, he'll reach out for his creditcard. Price, at that point, does not matter a whole lot, as long as it isn't ridiculously high nor so low he expects it to be a scam or low quality.

Yep. Seriously how can someone continuously get off on 15 second low quality clips, especially when they often don't have the "good" stuff. Go to most TGPs/MPGs and often times when you click a link you get sent to another TGP/MPG and don't even see the gallery in question. Also most TGPs/MPGs have the same fricken galleries on them. And those galleries have been seen many times before. Funny how some of these chicks have 200-300 movies to their name and yet the same 6-8 scenes appear on these sites all the time.

Until I guess about a year ago, I was making some very easy money with one of those video-only AEN's. Then they raised the price from $19.95 to $24.95 and the effect was like running into a wall.

But was the issue absolute price (that seems unlikely, since most sites I promote are more expensive) or the fact of an increase? Perhaps it wasn't price at all, because as is often the case, several other changes were introduced at the same time.

Whatever, it is fanciful in the extreme to imagine that porn surfers are immune to the vagaries of consumer psychology. Perhaps we are all able to defend conflicting points of view with apparent reasonableness, because we defend our positions by citing our successes. We conveniently overlook the reality that we fail to sell anything at all to the vast majority of our visitors. Another distortion arises because while we likely should be concerned about repeat business and not only the initial, arguably impulse purchase, most of the industry pays only lip service to renewals.

Which is not to say that the Wal-Mart comparison is valid: we are not selling branded cans and boxes which can be bought from multiple sources. We are a lot more like the car industry where people can choose to buy a $10,000 model or a $100,000 model and manufacturers can succeed or fail at any price point.

That said, looking at what some webmasters perceive as reasonable price/product combinations, it is hard to believe they would be in business if they faced more serious competition. And by insisting on trying to sell only porn to the millions of surfers who have surely proved by now they are not interested enough in porn to pay for it at any price, we must be leaving millions of dollars on the table. We have these eyes on our sites: why aren't we selling them something they will buy?

How much worse were the conversions with the $24.95 price tag?

The highest we could charge through our main processor was $39.95 a month

Price doesn't matter as long as it's in the industry ballpark. If content's king, and you have something exclusive, or different then others. Then noone looks at price.

In one year I raised a site from $14.95 to 24.95 then 29.95, and sign ups kept coming at the same rate. I added in an expensive 90 day promo, and they still signed up.

How many people ever complained when the price was raised you ask?...

ZERO.

However it comes back to content's king. If you are charging $20/30/40 for some rerun material people have seen elsewhere, then you may not get them to pay for it.

But if you have something unique, then they will pay regardless of the price point. This shows in people who spend $100's on individual clip sales a month, when they could just buy a membership and get it all for one price.

At last some one with his thinking in 2006.

As for impulse buy, those days are long gone or you are just going for the edges of the business. Because our main hardcore seam of customers are repeat buyers and you all know that. Otherwise exclusive would mean nothing. The impulse to buy is "I will buy from this site this month" and nothing more. There will always be the first time buyer, but don't base your income on him.

And how do I know? On this tour, [url=http://www.paulmarkhamteens.com/tour/]Paul Markham Teens, we use to put up 2 brand new, exclusive sets or videos every day, when we changed the tour to rotate the content the members rated the best, conversions went up. Yes the stuff that had been around the block converted better than the "Exclusive" content. Same shooters, same quality, same style. Only difference was the girl.

And there is the answer to the the question.

We're selling to a repeat buyer who buys on jerkability of the porn.

He's already signed up to a "Trial membership" for $2.99 and found he was ripped off, so he's cautious. He signs up on the ability of us to sell to him, not on the price.

Unfortunately or maybe fortunately there are no silver bullets in porn. No magic keys that will unlock the cash tills. What you have to do is convert the guy with skill, experience and talent, or drive masses of traffic to make up for the lack of skill, experience and talent. The sites that are top of the tree have both.

As for exclusive, to the guy buying it's another girl on another sofa sucking another dick. Unless it's Bang Bus or a different level of quality like Give me Pink. If it were "Unique" you would never sell it, the guy would be figuring it out what it was if it were unique. It's just another girl on another sofa..............

OH yes and finally someone said we see it all from our POV as if that's the only way to do it. Never a truer word spoken on GFY.

There are 100 ways to skin a cat and porn is a little more involved than cat skinning.

There really seems to be no difference with price I've worked with places that sell for 48 to 52 bucks a month and for people that sell for 24.95 you get the same number of a sales for some reason.