Originally Posted by jayeff

With a clean design and a $1 trial for anal movies I'm not surprized you are getting good signups. But I would be surprized if your conversions to full $38.77 a month memberships are going to be anywhere near as exciting. And if you don't make a trial-to-full conversion ratio of near 60% you are going to be depending on your consoles, upsells, etc., just to break even on your gross. Nor with hardcore movies would I figure on a particularly good retention ratio...

What you can figure on with the deal you are suggesting (and assuming you promote your program well enough), is plenty of traffic: including a bunch from the people with a solid base of sign-and-cancel surfers. Maybe you can deal with all of that if you know enough about working consoles, cancellations, upsells, etc. Still, each tweak you have to make to accomodate your committments to affiliates, is going to make your site less attractive to its customers. It's a downward spiral producing diminishing returns and Version# of your program shouldn't be long coming. If you don't run out of money first.

I know a site like yours needs volume and if you are going to rely on affiliates, you have to compete for them on the open market. But at least in terms of published payment rates, affiliates are seriously over-valued and that sticks you with high prices to your customers and all the other tricks you need to try to balance the books. In your place I would be looking at other ways to generate my initial traffic and sales.