Clips4Sale/Clips Store Owners. Step Inside

[Barefootsies]

I was helping a content client with a clip store (coaching on maximizing content) and I was showing them some examples of sites and had noticed something.

Some clip stores are not nessesarily following the 5 minute = $5.99 standard that has kinda been the default for some time. While I have always known this could be manipulated, it had got me thinking.

I had saw some clip stores where they sell all their shit for $5.99 regardless of length, and others with 2-3 minute clips charging $7.99+ (I believe there is a threshold going both up and down, but I could be wrong because I stick to the default).

How are YOU doing YOUR clip stores? Are you going with the default, lowering thinking more sales, or charging a premium?

[Barefootsies]

This thread needs some Markham.

[Paul Markham]

Originally Posted by Barefootsies

This thread needs some Markham.

Thanks LOL

Clips 4 Sale has been good for us and we need to find more time to develop other ones.

I think it's down to content, if you have content people need they will pay the extra, if you don't they won't. The Astral Content sells well on C4S and the Paul Markham Teens does not. Why spend $6 on a clip when you can buy a 3 day membership to lots of sites for less?

But if you have the option of only joining a site for $35 for 30 days then a clip is an option for many.

There is no Universal rule.

[Barefootsies]

Originally Posted by Paul Markham

I think it's down to content, if you have content people need they will pay the extra, if you don't they won't. The Astral Content sells well on C4S and the Paul Markham Teens does not. Why spend $6 on a clip when you can buy a 3 day membership to lots of sites for less?

But if you have the option of only joining a site for $35 for 30 days then a clip is an option for many.

There is no Universal rule.

[NaughtyRob]

I sell them cheap... as low as I can and that seems to work.

[Barefootsies]

Originally Posted by GetNaughty

I sell them cheap... as low as I can and that seems to work.

That seems to be working for some.

I see some stores who sell off older content on discounted deals. I guess that is their way of bringing in more money, or an excuse to send out a newsletter with lowering prices.

On the flip side, I see some content that is no so good, and they are 3-5 minutes, and charging a premium for it. So it makes me wonder how well it is selling.

[papagmp]

I'll take a 20 minute vid and break it into 4 clips - the first three ar $5.99 and the cum-shot is always $7.99. I do well as long as I find time to post updates. Just started sending my own traffic to my store so it should pick up.

[Barefootsies]

Originally Posted by papagmp

I'll take a 20 minute vid and break it into 4 clips - the first three ar $5.99 and the cum-shot is always $7.99. I do well as long as I find time to post updates. Just started sending my own traffic to my store so it should pick up.

Very nice.

Are you charging on the 5 minute = $5.99, or you vary it? Other than cum shot?

[MikeSmoke]

I usually go down one step from the default, which usually ends up being the lowest available price.
On long clips (10 mins+) I try to stay under $9.99).
But all of my clips have already been available on my membership sites, and are available as part of full length videos on my VOD site, so I don't feel I can charge a premium and still make many sales.

[StariaDaniel]

I usually charge cliptime+0,99 for the normal clips and cliptime+1,99 for full hd clips. But i'm giving away time-limited discounts on longer movies (e.g. 24,99 for a 40 minute video which normally costs 34,99) - but thats only for 30+ minutes videos, the normal ones are sold as stated above

[MRock]

For the most part, I have stuck with the default pricing. I think the best thing to happen to this biz was for someone to set a standard pricing for video clips. I believe Neal did that with C4S. I opened some stores over at clips.com, took their suggestion on lower pricing in the admin and it equaled BIG FAIL. I moved my prices back up to $1 per minute and get a monthly check from there too now.

I did recently post a 34 minute wam scene at C4S. I broke it into 4 parts, standard pricing, sold 0. Posted the full scene and gave discount at $24 and sold 5. Subject matter and rarity may influence some.

[Barefootsies]

Good feedback.

[Kiwigirl]

Interesting read as always.

[Barefootsies]

Originally Posted by Kiwigirl

Interesting read as always.

Not as interesting as some pictures of your toes to my inbox.

[Jim_Gunn]

On C4S I sell my shorter clips (four or five minutes long) which are sub-parts of my full length scenes (usually 25-45 min.) for the standard C4S pricing, eg 5 minutes for $5.99. And I sell the full length sex scenes for the higher prices of approx. $1 per minute, say $24.95 or $29.95, unless they are really long videos of 45-50 minutes in length, in which case I bring them back down to a maximum of about $29.95 or so. There are a couple of full length specialty videos that I sell for as much as $39.95 however and get regular sales for those too.

Clips.com standard pricing is a little less, and I follow suit with their recommendations- shorter sub-clips are just a few dollars ($3-$5 or so) and the longer full length videos I make top out at lower pricing than C4S, let's say $10-$15 for a full length 35 minute video. I sell less videos on Clips.com than C4S, but Clips.com have caught up a bit recently. Of course a lower default pricing than C4S plus a 60% commission for the site rather than C4S 40% means my net is much lower.

ClipClinic.com I have not managed to sell one single clip yet from the small selection I have uploaded, despite having my store featured for over a month. The interface there is maddeningly complex and it's simply too difficult and time consuming to continue to upload clips there. It takes as many as 20 steps and at least eight separate screens to add a new clip to a store unlike C4S and Clips.com's pretty usable interfaces, so I am not likely to keep uploading more clips unless I hire some broke webmaster or third world grunt worker to do the mind numbing work required to add more clips to my ClipClinic stores. It seems to me that the ClipClinic traffic is more fetish and amateur based anyway, so maybe my stores are not a great match for the customer base there. And like Clips.com you are looking at giving up 60% for the privilege of selling clips there.


All these third party clips stores are decent extra money if you know how to work them including sending your own traffic to the stores which is key now that the C4S main page is divided up into niches and overwhelmed with new studios. I will continue to offer my clips on all these platforms and others that may pop up. But I recently decided to exercise more control over my clip sales and traffic. Tired of giving up 40%-60% to the other platforms, I decided to create my own downloadable clip store at http://JimGunn.com that I can send my own traffic to. The site uses a heavily modified version of Wordpress (free) as the CMS, and uses my own billing and an inexpensive token based downloadable video-on-demand script.

Instead of a per minute pricing, I went with a flat pricing per scene of $5 or $10 per full length videos rather than cutting up the videos into short clips. It's nice to have customers purchase as much as $50 of tokens at a time and keep more than 95% of that money. It is also nice to have 100% control of my site design and overall presentation so that I can show trailers, scene descriptions, scene ratings, related scenes, niche tags and other interactive elements, and also keep 100% control of my own traffic and be able to collect customer information including sales data and email addresses. I think that the market for downloadable clips will continue to grow.

[Barefootsies]

Originally Posted by Jim_Gunn

On C4S I sell my shorter clips (four or five minutes long) which are sub-parts of my full length scenes (usually 25-45 min.) for the standard C4S pricing, eg 5 minutes for $5.99. And I sell the full length sex scenes for the higher prices of approx. $1 per minute, say $24.95 or $29.95, unless they are really long videos of 45-50 minutes in length, in which case I bring them back down to a maximum of about $29.95 or so. There are a couple of full length specialty videos that I sell for as much as $39.95 however and get regular sales for those too.

Clips.com standard pricing is a little less, and I follow suit with their recommendations- shorter sub-clips are just a few dollars ($3-$5 or so) and the longer full length videos I make top out at lower pricing than C4S, let's say $10-$15 for a full length 35 minute video. I sell less videos on Clips.com than C4S, but Clips.com have caught up a bit recently. Of course a lower default pricing than C4S plus a 60% commission for the site rather than C4S 40% means my net is much lower.

ClipClinic.com I have not managed to sell one single clip yet from the small selection I have uploaded, despite having my store featured for over a month. The interface there is maddeningly complex and it's simply too difficult and time consuming to continue to upload clips there. It takes as many as 20 steps and at least eight separate screens to add a new clip to a store unlike C4S and Clips.com's pretty usable interfaces, so I am not likely to keep uploading more clips unless I hire some broke webmaster or third world grunt worker to do the mind numbing work required to add more clips to my ClipClinic stores. It seems to me that the ClipClinic traffic is more fetish and amateur based anyway, so maybe my stores are not a great match for the customer base there. And like Clips.com you are looking at giving up 60% for the privilege of selling clips there.


All these third party clips stores are decent extra money if you know how to work them including sending your own traffic to the stores which is key now that the C4S main page is divided up into niches and overwhelmed with new studios. I will continue to offer my clips on all these platforms and others that may pop up. But I recently decided to exercise more control over my clip sales and traffic. Tired of giving up 40%-60% to the other platforms, I decided to create my own downloadable clip store at http://JimGunn.com that I can send my own traffic to. The site uses a heavily modified version of Wordpress (free) as the CMS, and uses my own billing and an inexpensive token based downloadable video-on-demand script.

Instead of a per minute pricing, I went with a flat pricing per scene of $5 or $10 per full length videos rather than cutting up the videos into short clips. It's nice to have customers purchase as much as $50 of tokens at a time and keep more than 95% of that money. It is also nice to have 100% control of my site design and overall presentation so that I can show trailers, scene descriptions, scene ratings, related scenes, niche tags and other interactive elements, and also keep 100% control of my own traffic and be able to collect customer information including sales data and email addresses. I think that the market for downloadable clips will continue to grow.

Good info.

JimmyGunn is the clips guru. Also meticulous about these things in testing, numbers, etc..

[CIVMatt]

Do you watermark with your store or a website shell site?

Also I was thinking of offering every clip in wmv, mov, amd mp4 - I have heard owners make separate mp4 sites of their clips and dont offer it all under one store, what are your thoughts on this?

[Paul Markham]

Originally Posted by Kiwigirl

Interesting read as always.

Yes agreed. And what does is tell us about the surfers and customers buying clips?

That's the real lesson and something we need to get if we are to turn the industry around. It seems to me there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands who will but a scene or a clip and often spend good money.

Yet paysites are clinging to the 30 day membership join and it's increasingly failing. Yes there are sites with 3 day joins and I know we do very well out of of it. The $5 sites do well, even with the magic join buttons, and are still there getting members and making us money. I know affiliates don't like the idea of 50% of $5, but will affiliates decide our future or the customer.

A buyer on a Clips site is often paying more for a one off clip.

What lessons can all we learn for our long term future?

[The Ghost]

Good info guys

[fuzebox]

Originally Posted by CIVMatt

Do you watermark with your store or a website shell site?

Also I was thinking of offering every clip in wmv, mov, amd mp4 - I have heard owners make separate mp4 sites of their clips and dont offer it all under one store, what are your thoughts on this?

I thought store owners just uploaded the different formats to keep their stores on the front page without actually releasing new content ;)

[Andy CHOOPA]

Clips4sale is just for surfers right? Webmasters can't license content from there can they?

[Barefootsies]

Originally Posted by Andy CHOOPA

Clips4sale is just for surfers right? Webmasters can't license content from there can they?

Correct.