would this pricing strategy work for a new paysite with never before seen content?
 

bullet points:



low monthly subscription price ~$14.95, maybe even $12.95 or $10.95
video streaming only, video as thoroughly locked down as possible but members can watch all they want.
pay a per clip price to download.
tons of photography available in member area available for download, slideshow, etc included in monthly subscription.


do you think that would be a viable structure?

the second you allow downloads, the content is no longer locked down unless you use some sort of drm..

ty.

any suggestions on that? skip the d/l or is there an effective drm these days that paying customers don't have a problem with?

also, i am thinking (hoping?) that if they have to pay for each and every clip, that would impede most issues...................

If you have good quality exclusive content any pricing model will work. The hard part will be keeping it exclusive:Oh crap

You don't have to reinvent to make it work...just make it better than what's available in your niche and protect the hell out of it:thumbsup

on a small niche the members are usually 'collectors' so they will want to down load the content and the more directed the niche the smaller the membership base, but more loyal. :2 cents::

talk to christopher at buydrm.com

he is a trusted expert when it comes to drm...




.

the problem with DMR is the bullshit if you change your computer up, change a drive, or new os install etc...I have a bunch or stuff from amazon right now on a drive I can't watch. don't think you want to spend all your time dealing with member complanits over DMR bullshit :2 cents:

whats the better alternative, letting all your shit end up on the tubes?

if people would have protected their content years ago, members would have gotten used to it..

in any case, i would rather piss off a few members and keep my content protected and more valuable.. :2 cents:




.

pimp roll does that and has 9.99 month

I know everyone has different experiences, but I've tried a lot of different price points and got LESS sales the lower I dropped the price. I actually get MORE sales at $29.95.

- It is exclusive content and not a saturated market.
- I also didn't see any increase in rebills when I lowered the price of rebills. It seems no matter what I do, rebills generally stay the same.

Regarding downloads... I'd love to see the entire industry do away with them but it will never happen. One method that seems to do OK is have your stream the highest quality you can give them, lock it down from rippers, and have a much lower quality download for those who *must* have it.

Also... don't take advice from anyone who doesn't have skin in the game. A lot of people will talk out of their ass and tell you what will and will not work, and that you are wasting your time, and they have no idea what works or doesn't. I've gone a year without a single video (new scene) showing up on a single tube, and only a few have shown up on cyber-lockers and torrents. You CAN cut your piracy down a lot, maybe by 80% - 90%. Don't let anyone tell you differently.

At this stage in the game, be it a locked down stream, DRM or whatever method you use, if you don't do something, you can guess where that road will lead. You won't beat piracy, but you can kick the shit out of it. But that is only one plague that is ravishing the industry right now.

yup, that's my view as well, just trying to sort out what level of *protect the hell out of it* is! :1orglaugh
i agree. i think if they can access all the content at a low price, *collect* the photos and pay a fair price to download the vids, that could be a viable solution for protection.

:thumbsup
will look into it.

cut out the middle man. just upload it to oron and post it to pornbb yourself. they pay by paypal.

going through this now, looks like good info- appreciated!

interesting results on the price point. perhaps $29.95 is the expected price, i wonder what pimproll's results are from $9.99 pricing....

perhaps what i can do is lock down a hq stream, offer a *tube quality* free download and then upsell hq downloads at a fair price...........

i agree that it's just one issue plaguing the industry but i do think there is room for a fresh, quality product. we'll see!!! :1orglaugh

seconded for the $29.95 price point, we did numerous comparison trials, $29.95 worked better than higher and lower price points, a slight discount on rebills ie $24.95 really helps to keep those members rebilling as well. We got rid of 30 day non-recurring memberships, our multi months got a massive boost and now we have an average sale of $41 consistently - it worked for us!

Just keep your material exclusive where possible, how? if you find the answer, share it!

Regarding price...

Honestly, everyone seems to have different results. You're going to have do a lot of A/B testing and see what fits for your content. And you'll have to play with what works with your videos. Since you are going the high quality route, that type of member may demand a much higher quality video and a download as well. You'll just have to experiment and see how it goes.

I have to assume Pimp Roll does well with their $9.99 option otherwise they wouldn't continue doing it, but I couldn't sell anything at that price. My sales actually went to total shit when I tried it. I was pretty shocked.

the thing re: price that is a sticky point for me is the amount of content i will launch with. i will prolly go live with 20-30 scenes split amongst 10-15 girls with 2 updates per week after that.

i'm not sure peeps would pay $29.95 until there's more content. regardless of how unique/exclusive................

Valid point. You can always start lower and raise it as you add more content.

The great thing about having a site is, you can change anything you want at any time. Just get it open and mold it along the way. Mistakes will be made, but you'll learn at each one of them and hopefully better the site each time.

will do!!! thanks for the input . :thumbsup

another thing you need to consider is the type of stream. Progressive streaming, like youtube, downloads the video to your hard drive & can be copied. Real-time streaming requires a special server. But the user cannot (easily) download the stream.

Review sites will hammer you if you dont offer a video download. This is because the last remaining consumers who pay for porn expect to keep a copy of what they paid for.

:2 cents:

even DRM is useless nowadays, so many screen capture utilities have settings to automatically zone in on the video player and capture in Divx format to the hard drive.

I have a site that bills at 9.95 a month, streaming video ONLY no downloads. new content stays active for only 30 days then is deactivated for 6 months or more. It updates twice a week at least and it does very well.

Exclusive & Cheap. Aren't really 2 things that go together if you want customers that are after quality.

We noticed the same thing ... that if the price was too low, people would think that would reflect the site and content thus not being as high quality and thus lower sales.

Try the Wal-Mart theory with off price points. No .95 - do like $12.81 and shit like that. Fools the mind.

if you already have everything in place(content, processing, server, etc), shoot me a mail and I'll spill a few beans ;)

DWB makes great points and we have seen the same phenomenon, which I think Kristin sums up eloquently - price/perception of quality. I agree with both of them on exclusivity being key regardless.

Regarding DRM - these days you can use DRM in a manner that is "invisible" to the surfer so it is not like the old days where it was just a pain in the ass. You can also use it to track traffic and re-market to ex members so it can be very useful, imho.

On going streaming only, there is a catch-22, because if you do it then even if the surfers don't complain - which is going to happen, but usually only those leeches that are trying to dl the entire site so whatever... but a lot of quality review sites, with killer traffic, will mark against you for doing it so that is an issue if you want their traffic.

super solid input everyone, thank you!

harv, email sent.

:thumbsup

WOW One hell of a post DWB... I would only ad that in addition to piracy hurting the buisness is the issue of reputable billing...

The idea of having 10's of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a day passing through billing companies with no oversight by us...

the ones who generate the traffic,produce the content, we should have more direct control and input of what goes on when our customers leave our servers to arrive at the servers of our billers.

Its not rocket science, in any industry you need reputable people working the cash register in your absence or you need real time unfettered acces to stats you know JUST LIKE THE BILLING COMPANIES...

THey have real time access to YOUR STATS but you don't...it has to change and it will change:2 cents:

Thats a weird thing abut people. Same scenario in import music CDs and DVDs...Crank the price and they buy, lower, because we cut out the middle people and customers stop. So let people pay more if it makes them happy.

Based on what you are saying, I definitely don't think that will be a problem. Especially if you do update regularly because that is what really keeps the interest and makes the customers feel like they are getting their monies worth. I am speaking from experience as this has been the case for us on our niche sites devoted to hairy bush and cream pie.

I recently caught myself paying for selected music on Band Camp at a rate of $7 - $10 per song! They had sample tracks on their site, which in turn linked to the full version to buy.

Of course I didn't buy a lot at this price, but it was music I had to have, so I paid what they asked for it. I couldn't find it for sale anywhere else, or at any other price. And after I bought it, even though it was expensive, I don't regret it.

It made me think about just how important exclusive and unique content is and how devastating piracy really is. Then I started thinking about their sample tracks vs the new beastie boys album which they are streaming in its entirety for free. You can buy it if you want or just stream it anytime. Because I can stream the beastie boys tracks when I want, I never bought it. Not a single song. And I love the beastie boys! But the tracks that I could not find anywhere else and only had a sample, I paid an insane price for, and don't regret it.


Have not seen that, but sounds sweet. Any links to a company offering such a thing?

Or talk to anyone at the EFF about why DRM doesn't work for an opinion from someone not trying to sell you drm.

:)

thank you, i very much appreciate the input!

When you say "Never seen before". What exactly do you mean?

A girl on a sofa/bed having sex, is about as saturated as you can imagine. The odds on you having never seen before are about as remote as anyone agreeing with me.

Unless the scenes are exceptional and unique it's been seen a 1,000 times before. Just a different girl and different sofa.

So you spend a fortune on locking it down and who cares, it will get stolen and if not. It's clone is available everywhere.

i mean this is content that i have shot and will continue to shoot going forward, that fills a niche that i have yet to see done properly or focused on in any site. there are bits & pieces here and there, but it has not been focused on as a kink.

you shouldn't be so negative, with that attitude you won't sell a lot of your adult photography e-books.

With todays technology, you have no idea they're protected. Hulu's are protected, the live debates last night had it, most major mainstream media corps have protection on the videos, and we have no idea.

I think this is a great strategy to run a site

As many have pointed out the $29.95 option does the best. I have seen lower price points convert slightly better - however, the price difference, even $5 more, easily kills the better conversion income. It does have a limit on higher costs as rebills drop and cb's are also done on income volume, so over $30 can cause trouble if you do volume.

With downloads vs. streams. A download does not mean 'to your pc' - Those words would be: Download to own or to your pc, THEN it means that. You can actually STOP calling them downloads/streams. Members do not know the difference.

You can test it yourself, poll your members and they'll say they like downloads, but put a vote option on the video formats, and the streaming options kill it. Same goes with video formats, sizes and quality. Another example is flash streams, while it can easily be the most popular video feature, it's always one of lowest polled options.

They have no idea wtf this stuff means, they're told by us what they like, they have no idea what to like other than what we tell them.

If you want to offer a download to own option, charge $5 extra for EACH, otherwise stream it and call it a download.

On-the-money post. :thumbsup

much appreciated! what would you call downloads and streams instead? i think this is really a good way to sort this out. :thumbsup

Cheap doesnt sell, good sells. If they like the content they will buy it. Go to clips for sale they sell clips all day long.One clip could be $30 for 30 min.

Simple names: You watch a movie, you play a video, you view a clip.

Full Scene or Movie
High Def or Big (fast internet)
Normal (most people)
Small (slower internet)
Clips (very slow internet)
Smart Phone or Phone Type

High Def is not a selling feature, it's a standard of quality that is 'visually' seen. You don't need to tell a person it's HD, they should be able to see it.

Things like 900 bit rate, x frames, the word quality, wmv/stream/mpeg, are all useless words. Put together a F.A.Q. for those that know wtf that stuff means and if they actually care....

when you say cheap, are you referring to cheap production or cheap pricing or both? :)

while i can see from others' experiences that $29.95 is the sweet spot, my concern is trying to charge $29.95 right out of the gate. but i guess that's what most all new sites do, regardless of the amount of content they launch with eh?

as long as i keep updating 2x a week right. i can see the value there.

much appreciated, but a question re:
i don't see the association with free or cost here?? as i read your previous comment (download v. stream) one has a upsell price & one does not. how does this fit with
watch a movie
play a video
view a clip?

or am i not understanding what you are saying?

:thumbsup

Hell of a good post :thumbsup

Im talking about price of membership.:)

The download vs. stream is more about the selection of words used. Download doesn't mean store it on your hard drives, it means download to watch it, play it. A normal event to make a video start working....

It's a paysite, it all costs money.. If you don't tell the surfer on the tour that they can download to own the videos, then they don't expect it in the members area.

Just offer a download to own or download to your pc link, that charges more for the option within the member areas directly, for each video... Sell them whatever quality THEY want.

i see, so you are saying price point is not an incentive to buy. thx for the clarification. :thumbsup

I don't necessarily agree that they can spot it. We have movies that are labeled HD that aren't fully HD :) and surfers don't complain. They get played and purchased just as much as our true HD.

Aye, I didn't mean it like they could see the difference between HQ and HD. More that if your videos are good quality, it can be seen without putting an HD stamp on everything.

They don't care, as long as it's good quality.


And on related rant... this is what I hate about 99% of review sites, they lower ratings for non HD videos or lower bit rates (that have small file sizes but very good quality) when the surfer has no clue and actually likes what you offer.