The myth surrounding recurring signups

Nice thank you... You should add that to my recurring post????

That was helpful

I was crunching those numbers earlier... But I hadn't made a graph yet and now I have one to stare at..

Brad

Nothing will level off if you dont slack and keep pushing the envelope.

I say for every one member that cancels get 2 to sign up, its all how you look at it.

You're right. That's what I was trying to say indirectly - if you count on recurring billing to make you rich you'll never make it there. Initial signups are the only way to take it to the next level.

Wait are you talking about your member site or sponsors? Now im confused, my sponsors that offer recurring last alot longer than 33% and as for my member sections, any "solo girl" site should maintain a member for at least 6 months.

I have a cam girl who does a site and she gets more 6 month memberships than anything. And the average stay is well over 6 months for solo girl sites.

You are mostly right -- the unlimited income deal is mostly a myth -- and think about how much you have to trust the paysite/processor...

Anyhow there will always be a few guys that will stay members forever on some programs...

A few programs out there that seem to retain some members forever..... I stop sending traffic and I still get the checks every month -- years later ;)

Hey TheFly, did you ever get my email?

I have a guy who rebills every month for a site thats been closed for 3 months.

I'll take his $10 a month. He is clearly pretty dumb.

LOL. I can't say I don't know what you're talking about. I have a guy who gets rebilled 3 different times a month!!!! I should tell him, but I think he should be punished for not taking a closer look at his cc bill each month.

and when he finds out, welcome to the wonderful world of chargebacks... which negatively affects this whole industry.

and congrats on helping to kill consumer confidence you fucking mongoloids.

Fucking pathetic. I hope you lose your sites eventually.

Maxxxine, your statement (and graph) is true only for constant traffic levels. With each additional month of increasing, recurring income, you've got to plow money back into PROFITABLE traffic and you'll continue to grow - that's the magic of recurring traffic.

So you think we should babysit consumers?

I had a guy mail me the other day asking why he gets checks from us. We looked him up and he had sent 3000 hits in 1999 then stopped. He is sending hits again

When YOU know whats happening is wrong, then its fucking wrong. Period. Thats not babysitting, thats doing your fucking job.

If I was your processor, and I read that, I would drop you in a fucking minute.

If some guy signs up for my site 3 times (when it clearly states that rebills will occur if you don't cancel), it's not my responsibility to go in behind him and cancel his other two memberships. Hell he may have signed two of his friends up with his card for all I know. LOL.

riiiiiight.

In my case, I am not the owner, just an affiliate, it is up to ccbill, the webmaster or the customer to deal with it.

best way to contact me is ICQ#1622420 ;)

There are always some users that will stay members till the end of time even if you stop sending traffic, and you will earn some amount (not necessarily huge) forever, no?

#1. I don't condone illegal behavior.
#2. I stand by my statement: unless I know for a fact that a consumer really doesn't know that he's being billed 3 separate times, then I'm going to assume that he is well aware of what's going on.

And be nice :o) I would never wish the kind of evil you've wished on me.

BS.... That's all I gotta say..

Peace

I think your math is way too simple.

At some point you need to factor in that now you are making money, you can afford some cash for marketing.

At another point you might figure out that guy you got hammered with in Vegas is a all access DMOZ editor who can get you a killer listing with most search engines - Just by asking.

Then someday you'll wake up with a bright idea..... And figure out that you convert your entire customer base and talk them into buying a membership to your second site.....

The next morning in the shower, another idea comes to you.....

My point is the bigger you get at this, the more options you have open to you, the more money you have to invest in your business, the more people you get to know, and the more help you get.

Of course, all of this assumes you have your own website and your pushing your own program. That's not to say affilates don't have options also.....

No, not very many and if they did do so it would be because they didnt look at their cc statement too closely. AND in these situations eventually their card would expire. AND at the time of signup there is code that is passed on from the transaction that limits the total rebills. I believe 99 is CCBIll's default. This means a customer can only be rebilled 99 times.

Cheers!

BV

Maxxxine,

You are right. Recurring billing is a myth. I'll take the per signup every time.

Recurring billing used to be the goose that laid golden eggs every month. The whole idea of recurring billing came from the BBS days when people signed up for a whole year on most BBS and were renewed every year.

It used to be every time we got a signup at $24,95 I would say that's not just $24.95, that's $24,95 a MONTH. Nobody ever cancelled. Now the average stay has got to be less than 3 months.

BTW, when I say they never cancelled I mean it, We have members that signed up in 1995, 1996, 1997 and 1998 that are still members.

Yep. This is true.

I agree with Labret and take offense to both Maxxxine and Heymatty, that's the root of the biggest problem facing our industry. I'm sure you're both great people but I think you should give some more thought to your actions.

I absolutely believe that people need to be accountable for their mistakes. However, being a responsible business owner supercedes the customer's accountability for their own idiotic mistakes. Right is right and wrong is wrong. If you closed a site and didn't cancel out all the recurring billing you're a thief, plain and simple. If a customer signed up three times and you noticed it but did nothing about it then you're being both lazy and dishonest.

I am confident you'll characterize your behavior as something else but this isn't even a subject that can be argued. It's no different then getting too much change back at the store or picking up a $20 bill that someone in front of you dropped on the street. If you don't return it, you're lacking some moral fiber.

The single biggest issue that has affected our industry the most is dishonest business behavior. It's not that there is too much porn out there - for at least the last several years there has been more porn then any one surfer could ever visit. Shady billing practices DO burn consumers and make them less likely to purchase. And POOR SUPPORT is why your web site customers feel so damned inclined to CANCEL as soon as they sign up - because of the few times when they emailed some other site and the fucking owner didn't do anything about it.

On the issue of chargebacks, it's reckless actions like both of yours (and much worse of course) that have put the state of credit card processing for adult sites in the predicament it's currently in. Sure, laugh it off and leave it up to your 3rd party processor but be rest assured of one thing: if everyone did that they'd go out of business, none of these companies are infalliable.

If you're serious about this business and wanting to grow to higher levels at some point you're going to need to learn an appreciation for the customers that put food on your table. I challenge you to ask yourself how much time you devote to servicing your current customers via support or members area enhancements - chances are that both of you spend at least 90% of your time doing marketing. That's going to catch up with you.

I'll be the first to say there's a lot of fucking idiots out there. A LOT. The other day I got an E-mail from some dumb bastard that asked if he could have a phone sex call billed to the hotel room he was staying in... what the fuck?! Nonetheless, we're in the business of serving the masses for better or worse. I would strongly recommend that both of you think twice about how you manage your customer relations as certainly what comes around goes around.

Cheers

Brad

amen.

I absolutely agree that WE ALL should be responsible business owners. I think my mistake lies in my response when I said that this member should be "punished" for not checking his cc statement. The whole story is actually this: A member attempted to sign up but something was screwed up on my sign-up page. He ended up trying to sign up 3x thinking that none went through. A few days later, he emails me saying that he REALLY wants to join my site but my sign-up page was down. So I checked and noticed that all three of his transactions went through. I emailed him letting him know PRECISELY how to get a refund for the other two transactions. He still hasn't cancelled as far as I know.

As far as members' trust, I definitely do not take this lightly. I don't think they're dumb for signing up three times, but I do wonder especially AFTER I fully informed them of the dups.

Due to an error on your sign up page he signed up three times?

I give members extra bonus months if they are billed for ANYTHING incorrectly, I also give them access to sister sites, I dont overlook it for what could it be 30 bucks? Knowing I am honest is worth more than ANY amount of recurring.

You can easily kill the other 2 accounts.

....and I am proud of you son. You win the Boy Scout award of the year.

Ok this member and I are actually emailing each other back and forth trying to find out why the heck he never cancelled. He says that if you sign up for a site and cancel the same day using iBill, that if you attempt to sign up for another site that you will be declined. Any truth to this?

And you are absolutely right. In this business, honesty IS the best policy. I did inform him of the triple transaction via email and told him exactly how to cancel.

I dont know who you process with but by default, a member cannot sign up more than once using the same username and pass until the original membership is deleted manually in a given period.

Also you should be easily able to prevent duplicate credit card #'s from being used on your site in a given period. So, if you honestly dont want to take peoples money unfairly, just set this period to be 30 days. Therefore, they cant sign up more than once with either the same username or the same credit card.

again...not sure who you process with, but most places you can enable/disable this feature.

Alright here's what we came to: turns out that this member had been declined (?) before when he signed up to a site then got a refund. He was afraid that this would happen again so he never got a refund BUT he did cancel the rebills. To resolve the issue, he gets a tape :o)

I have a lot respect for you guys and I hope that I haven't pissed anyone off. I'm still learning..... everyday I'm still learning.... However, I do want you to know that none of this was malicious --- simply a temporary error in judgement.

I process with phreakin' iBill! Arrrrggghhh!!!!

i had a amateur site shut down in '99, not a huge member base but steadly increasing, member retetion was great.... and i manually terminated every account... i know, it is fucking sweet, i just had the thought to rebill them one more month when the site was down... but i am glad and proud i did not do it.


it is not as fucked up as it seems to be... just upsell everyone you have to other sites..

i used to think like this: try to gather everyone at my site AND keep them...

now i think like this: try to gather everyone and then upsell them

it is like running a mcDonalds and instead of keeping the customer for ever just tell him after he has eaten that PizzaHut is good also and that he should check it out - as long as PizzaHut is paying me of course....

For those of you that don't get Andy Dunn's weekly webmaster newsletter, he recently had his annual issue where he talks about the issue of recurring versus per sign up. "Pay Site Math" is what he calls it.

Here are his latest graphs:
http://trix.sexswap.com/paysitemath.html

Here is the issue where he starts talking about it:
http://trix.sexswap.com/swap231.htm

Here is his conclusion:

You may notice that if you put the two trangles together on the ends of blue graph, it would equal the front of the red graph. What's this all mean? It means you cash out your chips earliest in PER SIGN UP systems and there is a BILLING LAG in recurring systems. This is why I have ALWAYS preferred per sign up. If you like getting cash after you stop working, then you may prefer recurring percentage.

Andy is a madman and he also gives his opinion on why content isn't important, more formulas than you need, Bang Bus type sites, and all sorts of other random opinions. Agree or disagree, it's worth reading, as is most all of Andy's stuff.

The income potential surely depends on how good your sponsor is and whether people renew? I have one sponsor I haven't promoted for over two years but they still sell me a couple of hundred dollars a month because people I signed up two years ago are still renewing month after month.

There is no right or wrong answer as far as per-click, per-signup or recurring - it all depends on your traffic and the site you're sending it to.

You need to figure out conversion (e.g. 1:500), trial-to-recurring ratio, and retention for the site in question FOR YOUR TRAFFIC.

Once you have a rough idea of that, you can determine which program is the best for you. Run the numbers (this is why they made Lotus 1-2-3 people!) for each and see what the result is:

5000 uniques
1:500 = 10 sales @ $35 = $350

5000 uniques @ $.04 = $200

5000 uniques
1:500 = 10 sales
50% convert @ $12.79* = $63.95
3 month avg retention = $191.85

Then you play 'what-if' with the numbers and with different sites.

The thing that makes it so difficult is that it's very hard to get the above numbers for any particular website, let alone 3-4-5 different ones (and be accurate about it).

Hey Eric, what is your opinion regarding making your site multilingual (ie. German, Japanese, Chinese, etc.)? A friend of mine does this but has not been able to tell me how effective it's been for her.

Thanks :o)

I dunno.. I provide links to various languages, and I know they get used, but I don't track that (though I probably will soon)

Here is how to figure out the mathematics of recurring signups ... question #2.

http://www.oxxxxxxxxxxxxxx/askcolin/

Doesn't matter which way you look at it, Labret is right.

There is no reason to jeapordize your business and a great lifestyle for a few dollars. Its hard enough to get some people to sign up... when they hear of shit like this, they're never going to enter their CC number.