Quantum I am in the same boat with private byots that average 1:80. Lets just face the facts. More people WILL join a site if it has trial options $1-5 dollars than a site that only offers a month price. Our sales are going to drop PERIOD. There is nothing they can offer or do that will change that. Honestly im getting tired of hearing we are going to make MORE money with the new program. It is IMPOSSIBLE unless you send a ton more traffic. I ran pay sites for years and I know what a difference it is when trials are taken away. Sales drop. Thats it. BUT I am very curious as to what their claim is. What is the magic that is going to make surfers whip out their credit cards and drop 30 bucks FASTER then they would drop 3 bucks. They must be giving out free blow jobs. If I am wrong about my wisdom ill appologize. Until then get prepared to lose a shit load of income every week byoters!

I know you're not basing this on fact. I can understand how you'd think that SHOULD be the case, but in fact it is NOT. I tried $2.95 trials early last year for a few months. The conversion ratio was NO BETTER than it was when I switched it to full price sign up. To be honest, the conversion rate went UP slightly when I took away the trials.

It seems human psychology relates price to value. Price something TOO LOW and no one wants to buy it because they assume it is junk.

This is my experience with trials.

BTW: the percentage of those converting from the trial to a full price was even MORE horrible... why would anyone want to pay for a full month when they can download a month's worth of content in 3 days? They can join for the trial each month, download the previous month's content, and cancel.

Does this make ANY sense?

I also have a bunch of links pointing to BYOTs and I know that by the time the program is dropped I will still be sending traffic b/c of the galleries I have made. It will be hard to change the pages, b/c as you all know once you change a gallery page you risk the chance of being blacklisted. :( The question I have is where will the traffic be redirected to? Does anyone know?

I feel for you man, because I know that a bunch of webmasters have made an entire business of BYOTs. From what I've read on the ARS BBS , the BYOTs convert better than the regular paysites. Having the BYOTs with no trial really sucks and stacks the deck in favor of the regualr ARS paysites. I've got tons of galleries that use BYOT sponsor links, so I guess I won't expect many conversions from those once things change.

You might want to look into some premium AVSs if you can design good tours. I don't know about the Epic BYOT, but I would check for feedback from multiple webmasters before I invested a lot of time it.

Good luck. I had strongly considered doing a couple of BYOTs in niches that didn't have many. Glad I didn't invest the time and resources.



:)

LOL. Excellent.

good that ars is dropping the byot tour program.There have been many webmasters making a killing off deceptive tours

Ouch, that's pretty big news. I had heard a rumour of something going to happen; guess that could be it.

Cheers,
Matt

"I know you're not basing this on fact."

And how do you know this? Have you looked at his stats or do you just know everything?

Just because something works with your site doesn't mean it works with every other site on the planet. Trials can make a huge difference. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. It depends on the site, content, marketing, traffic, etc.

Epic Cash has BYOT program!

p.s. Hooper is really a closet homo

Your absolutely correct about bad retention when you offer trials. But BYOT is per sign up and not recurring. Webmasters choose to advertise PPS because they dont want to have to deal with worrying about cancelations/retention. So that point really has nothing to do with what my argument was about. Sure retention is important for the success of byot programs as a whole. If the members area doesnt retain then byot will be closed down.

YOur also correct about how in some cases gross sales increase when you raise the join price. I have only seen this actually happen when trials were raised from like $4.99 to $12.95. If you have a product/service in big demand and not readily available elsewhere for less you can get away with inflated prices, sure. No disagreement there.

50 drops

"Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't. It depends on the site, content, marketing, traffic, etc."

This is true. All I know is that if there are 2 sites EXACTLY the same in design, content, traffic and one you could join for $2.99-$4.99 and the other cost $29.99, the trial site would get more sign ups. I have tried and tested this over 50 times in the past 7 years, that was always my results. As Sly_RJ said its different depending. Im sounding like a broken record. hehe

MarcDe, I didnt see any announcement on ARS about the new BYOT 2. You said monday didnt you?

Eagerly waiting.