It is not just the economy making people tighten their belts, but the contraction of the consumer credit markets. A site membership is a small indulgence and a lot of SpookyCash site members were perfectly happy to continue paying monthly, but their credit cards were turned off or their limits were slashed, as the banks paid themselves bonuses with our tax dollars. I believe the customers are probably telling the truth on this because I had my own primary credit card frozen the day before Xmas by BofA and I know my card was in good standing and I'd been their customer for years.

Got a spare bedroom? :winkwink:

As has been said many times (by Robbie for sure just the other day) this is the perfect storm. The glut of content doesn't help, the pirates don't help, the problems with high risk processing don't help, the credit crunch doesn't help.

There are still plenty of people out there that would love to pay for a membership (despite knowing full well that they can get it for free) but have credit issues ... whether their own fault or through clamp downs.

Except that you're not taking into account the fact that the PPS payout is much larger. You're just taking the same payout stretched across several months. If the main sites you do PPS with have a bad month in sales, you just don't blow all your money, lol.

Like I said early in this thread, revshare vs. pps for me has nothing to do with "the long run" or "money over time" or whatever, and everything to do with $ per member. Yes I have members rebilling for years too, but that doesn't change the fact that I average under $30 per 50% revshare sponsor, and under $25 if they use trials. It doesn't matter how you stretch those revshare rebills out, it's a very easy formula of lifetime earnings divided by lifetime sales. I can do a lot more with that money up front, like scale it into even more money.

:2 cents:

And since I am sure you have extremely targeted traffic I'm also afraid it's a sign of the times

I suppose everyone's experiences are different. Mine stretch out over years and I made a lot more money in that time than the guys who took the PPS. I also chose "no trial" options everytime I was given the opportunity to.

As far as the money up front making me money...well, as I said l made a lot of money in revshare. Matter of fact...made enough to buy a lot of property and also put a nice chunk in the stock market. Seemed like a good thing to do at the time. Lost my ass big time. lol

When you're making several mortgage payments on commercial properties that no longer have tenants because their little businesses went out of business...AND the property is underwater and you owe more than it's worth so you can't sell it...well, then trying to take my porn money and invest it in the "mainstream" world no longer looks like I was a genius. :(

I had to divest myself of all that stuff and ended up losing over 3/4 million dollars by the time the bloodbath was over on the real estate. But I had no choice or it would be draining my money every month to the ground paying the mortgages (the rent to tenants of course paid it before and even made a nice little profit 4 years ago).

So now I don't even THINK about doing stuff outside of porn. Not at least until this economy turns itself around. Though I do wish I still had enough extra money to buy real estate NOW. I'd buy every damn thing I could at rock bottom prices. Unfortunately since my affiliate revenue stream is steadily eroding due to not being able to make new sales to programs anymore...that ain't happening.

I guess I'm basically hanging on and riding this shit out. The things I did for the CM site have made it a money earner and it truly has been recession-proof. Thank God!

Obviously I count on rebills for my own paysites (although 100% revshare is different than 50%), and I send a lot of traffic to other programs, about half of which goes to revshare programs (mostly because that's all they offer). Some do retain better than others, but if a program is going to offer me $35 today on a trial signup (and many do, without shady xsells or tricks even), I'm not going to argue.

My thinking is...if they offer $35 on a trial, they ARE monetizing that in some way that you might not agree with. Got to be some kind of x-sell or some way they are making money off of that trial. Especially in today's world where (as you pointed out yourself) people don't seem to rebill as much.

I have always taken some of both PPS and revshare depending on the program, traffic source, quality of product ect. I think the programs we do revshare with will stay that way as I have always seen them as long term partners and I think they will be around for a long time to come.

I like to have a mixture of PPS and Rev share in amongst the sites I promote. For bigger more 'normal' hardcore and basic niches I tend to go PPS (such as with Max Cash and with Hookup Bucks dating). However, when I am doing 'real' fetishes and real micro niche then I like finding the revshare programs through CCBill.

Exactly the way I see it. Was having trouble putting it into words but +1.

I dont need to have it over time to better manage my funds. I can do more business and grow alot quicker if I have the money now and also more overall of it. The ONLY perk I could see these days to doing revshare is if you dont trust yourself to invest the money properly. Which surely if your in the game this long you dont have trouble with that anyway.

I get the revshare thing 4+ years ago and further back but the last few years PPS IMO is the way to go. I only started 3.5 years ago and have grown at a very rapid pace and I attribute this alot to using PPS everywhere I can. I increase sales month after month, year after year so I dont really have any worries about sales just stopping. If sales stop then revshare isnt going to carry you forever thats for sure. At that point its time to move outta the game anyway.

I guess I just dont think I would have had the funds to reinvest so quickly with doing revshare. Ive invested large amounts back into the business through buying sites, links, content, adding employees, scripts, etc etc etc and revshare I just dont feel i would have had those options considering i started with 100 in my bank account.

I dunno, nobody is going to agree but I reckon healthy debate cant hurt. :)

another edit** lol. I do have about 25 percent revshare and I think if I seen those rebills going up month after month then I would be like hmmm, maybe I shoudl do some more of this. Fact is that rebill amount stays the same or has even gone down some in the last year especially even though overall new sales have gone up a good amount. Just tells me if there was ever a time to drop revshare it would be now more then ever.

There's not a lot that I won't agree with :1orglaugh

There are plenty of ways for a sponsor to monetize a signup which does not translate into the 50% revshare payout. I'm happy leaving that to them and taking my comission.