Quality of ARS surfer member area's
 

Assuming you've seen the member area's of some of their sites, if you were an average surfer what would you think?

I'd feel robbed.

The member's areas are very generic. They're loaded with standard plug-in content and very little niche-specific material.

...Of course, I haven't seen one in a year or so...

Most of the big name sponsor sites are pretty bad inside.

It's no surprise member retention is in the toilet.

It's better not to look, if you are trying to make the sale.

How about this poll

Does it make a difference?
YES

NO


I say no. ARS only pays per signup so whether or not they keep their members is really of no concern to you.

And honestly, do you really think you know something about this business that Marc De and his people don't?
If having the members areas set up differently would really help retention don't you think they'd do it?

If a small paysite owner fills up the member's area with free plug in and upsell stuff; you can understand; but when big companies do the same; then you can't understand.

it does make a difference, especially when surfers begin to think every porn site sucks balls and won't sign up to another one.

That's fucking stupid.

If you get a bad hamburger from McDonald's are you going to then assume that all hamburgers suck and never try wendy's, or burger king, or rallys, or any of the dozen smaller local joints?

No, if you like hamburgers you'll keep trying different kinds until you find a place that you like enough to be a regular customer.

i know plenty of people who laugh at the thought of signing up for a paysite.

its much different than hamburgers...

I can't believe how bad these fucking sites are, fuck it. You want rebills, find a small niche site doing all original content.

ARS knows thousands of people who DO SIGN UP for their paysites every singel day.

If you're so smart and know it all then why haven't you opened up your own per sign up program?
With your vast knowledge of how to manage a members area I'm sure you could pay double what ARS does for a signup.

If you started getting shitty hamburgers all the time, you'd start eating chicken. If you join a bunch of shitty porn sites, you'll start jacking off to DVD porn. :2 cents:

And they soon join the ranks of the hundreds of thousands who will never join a paysite again because of the shitty content.

This seems to be the most popular business model these days.....

1. Build a program with dozens of sites.
2. Put up lackluster member areas to save money.
3. A strong affiliate base will reel surfer Bob into one of these sites.
Note: There's no way in hell Bob will renew such crap, but you already planned for this.
4. Due to the number of sites you've got, reel in a clueless Bob yet again to a different site in your program to screw him out of another $30.

The chain goes on until Bob has finally had enough. How many times is a surfer willing to initially feel ripped off before he stops buying paysites? 2($60)? 3($90) 4($120)?

The VERY vast majority of paysites are screwing over the customer in some way. This is a fact.

Grossly over-simplified: but even if a steady number of plastic-enabled surfers join the 'Net each year and in 1996 100% of our potential customers were newbies, then today 85% of our potential customers are experienced surfers.

We are not the first industry to sell crap at the outset. But the inievitable change in demographics means that if we can go on selling crap, well that would be a first.

With average retention only a few months, most of our customers have had plenty of time to be burned more than once. If you wouldn't keep paying for disappointment, what makes you think our customers are any different?

I figured AVS would self-destruct for the same reason. People still make money with it so there goes that theory.

I mean fuck, those sites are pathetic.

The only flaw in your theory is that the word "destruct" is too strong.

5 years ago the AVS sector held a far bigger part of the market than it does now and for thousands of webmasters AVS sites were their sole - and often a major - source of income. Another sign of their decline is to see how deep you have to dig among search terms before you come up with any that are AVS-related.

A few people in this thread have made comments similar to yours because some of the low quality operators are still major players. But again, compare their former dominance of the market with their position today. They once had the market almost to themselves, so you can hardly argue that they have got stronger.

Who gives a shit? Do you have such a close relationship with your surfers that they write to you and bitch when they sign up for something that doesn't meet their expectations 100%?

If no-one complains to you personally, keep selling it if it makes you money. If you get grief, find something else.

garce

Your comment and your sig couldn't go together any better

You want rebills out the ass! HINT! HINT! HINT! :)

http://www.amateursunited.com/school.html

Hugs,
Danielle

I promote ARS pretty faithfully, and I have to admit that this thread made me curious so I signed up to Adult Movie Station. I had been on the site about a year ago also, and I have to say they have made large changes since then. I think I would actually pay for this now (and I would almost never pay for porno online).

I think for the most part sponsors problems with retention being in the toilet stems from the following:
1) First and foremost too much free porn! Go to the hun everyday and you can see all the full on hardcore pics and vids you need ... there is NO incentive to buy when you have shown me the best parts and I already blew my load on your free "samples".
2) Unrealistic claims. I have seen numerous webmasters advertise for a girl, let's call her girl X. Come in and see 11 hours of girl X getting pounded in the ass by insane circus clowns. Also 8025 pics of her screwing ex President Boris Yeltsin. Not to that extent, but I KNOW that many of these girls may be found in a member section, but not to the extent of the claims made by us the webmasters.
3) I have heard Marc De say this before and agree whole heartedly. You have consumers who have figured out the game. They know enough to sign up for a trial, cancel immediately, and then go surf their cheap porn for 3 or 5 days ... then when they get sick or their magazine or DVD again go and sign up and cancel again. It is a vicious cycle really.

I for one feel for these sponsors and think that we are ALL in trouble if many people do not change their ways of marketing, and or sponsors find new ways to change the business model that things work on.
:2 cents:

or buying chickens maybe ... eek !

you can make more per sign up with a site that kicks ass and pays a %...

exactly and as this industry matures companies with shit members areas will have to change. in fact this industry may actually be in the early stages of the maturity phase.

Out of any major sponsor's site i'd say most ars sites kick major ass.
They have so much great content on them and are updated every day with new movies and pictures.:)

What more do you want?

I don't understant what the fuck some off you ppl are squackin' about! The members areas are fucking TOP CROCH!!! They give the custies everything they want and if they don't you they can TELL THEM WHAT THEY WANT and they WILL do something about it! Some of you ppl are crazy their shit is GOLD!

check them out these days...tons of improvements.

What good is any of your opinions on porn? You're all webmasters!! You guys look at more porn in a week then any man/women does in a year I'm sure! Our average customer is that same 'average' person, who would never go to an adult store, who has never heard of things such as: double anal, ass to mouth or double penetration. This is all wild stuff to them and will be for a while i'm sure.

ARS has been paying the bills for years, if they're members sections sucked that bad they would have lost a lot of money a long time ago and be out of business :)

Some of you guys wouldn't be happy unless you saw transsexual midgets doing amputee horses!

Just my two cents :)

:1orglaugh That is true.

Plus when you are the biggest program like ARS people will take shots at you. They make money for me and that is all I care about. If you don't make the paper with them then I guess :321GFY and start your own program hahah.

        &n bsp;       &nbs p;                 &n bsp;       &nbs p;     ARS MEMBERS SECTION RULES

I think that you people that are trash talking ARS members area need to go and sign up and see what you're accually talking about cuz the sites are the sheezy! Tons and Tons and Tons of content!

aahh... another big sponsor bashing thread eh? First off without these big affiliate programs none of us would have any kind of guaranteed income. I've been stiffed on payments from smaller companies, but never from a larger one - they know they have a lot more to lose if they start using any shady tactics to save money.

I've signed up to sites from all the big sponsors I promote as well as a number of smaller sites to see what their selling points were in order to sell them more effectively. I couldn't really see a whole lot to complain about with the ARS sites, while others looked a lot worse in comparison. The amount of content they have is staggering. Yes, there are a lot of leased plugins but were they organized well? did they fit the site they were on? was it easy for the surfer to get around in them? Yes.

Anyone who was saying that we don't even have to care about this because we're still getting paid has a good point too. Last I checked ARS was still paying out $25-$35 per sign up, depending on the join option you choose. So it seems to me they're doing something right with their sites.

Nice!:thumbsup

btw, how come the guys from ARS are never on here slammin other programs like this?

oh yeah, they don't need to.

and I agree, pretty much any member section has more porn than any surfer is gonna look at. I do my own customer service, and never once has anyone ever said "250,000 pics arn't enough for me man, get some more" or "I've seen all the videos, do you have anything else" If I get any questions about content it's more like, "I really like this video feed, what else do you have that's similar" or "I don't have time to go through all the videos, I like big tit's, which are the best big tit videos" shit like that. I think a lot of people here are basing their opinions on what they want to see instead of what the surfer wants to see. Problem is, your head is so distorted from staring at Bukake video all day that 2 sexy teens playing with each other no longer gets you hard, but trust me, when jonny at home locks his bedroom door and loads the same teen lesbian video, his dick is already so hard from the screen capture, that he's about to burst.

you can be stiffed by larger companies, i was stiffed by traffic cash. plenty of smaller sites retain well and pay on time. a lot of them don't even cut the cheques. all the cookie cutter sites are pretty much all alike. they have 100k of this and that but its all crap streams and pics.

So with your unparalleled knowledge and vast expertise you could open a paysite and pay $35 per signup and make way more money than ARS does in profit.

Since you know so much you should open your own pay per join program.....until you do, SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Its easy to sit on your soap box and tell someone else how they should run their business, its quite another to actually be able to run the same business better than them.

i would put my money in places other than porn...

If I tell bookmarkers one month that Paysite X is great and they sign up only to find out it sucks, are they ever going to believe me again? Are they going to now associate every paysite being promoted on my TGP as something that probably sucks too?

I'll bet sites that deal with a large number of bookmarkers and promote only quality sites do far better over the long term than sites who try and sell crap to their bookmarkers all the time.

ars member area was terrible. now that they have added the extremely limited trial area for trial members, it's even worse. surfers see this glowing promo promising the world, and get a generic site that is mostly upsell on the trial, which is not a trial anymore - just a preview. most of what they advertise you can't get with the new trial area at all.

i guess they're trying to make quick cash with upsells to monthly.

why do i care? because surfers that join a site like this, or even worse, a couple of sites like this, are NOT going to want to join another member site anytime soon. and keep in mind these guys were credit card wielding porn buyers. a lot get billed even after they cancel, and they don't even get what they joined for.

ars' retention was never greart, and they always say that's how just how it is, yet i notice that partner programs i promote with 100% niche content have better than 200% the retention of ars across the board.

Which sites have you people been signing up to?

I've gotten a pass to milf search to check it out and it has shitloads of custom content. - Thought about opening a site like that, but I'd guess you'd need all that custom content or your retention would be 0.

I'm not even going to get into what surfers are going to pay for, cause everyone here that runs paysites knows.

You can change up your members section a million times, have 100,000$ of custom content backing it up. In the end if the surfer is expecting something else , doesn't want to pay 40$ a month or whatever your loosing those rebills.

Thats about it.

A no brainer.
If you put your money in a generous per signup program instead of content , what do you think:Graucho

First off, which site did you join?

Second, glowing promo promising the world? Surfers don't care about anything except impulse buying on the most part. Even if you give them everything they want, they'll still cancel. Why pay for something that you can dl and save on your computer and jerk off to later for free? Unless you want more or newer porn.

Third, Who's retention is 200% better? Show me a paysite with 120% retention and I'll send some traffic.

I'd imagine that ARS knows a lot more about their business than most webmasters here.

find out yourself. who wants another bang bus, converts and retains great and then every noob starts promoting it. now it doesn't make the money that it used to.

But ARS don't own the paysites.

If IBM had a clue about the computer market in the late 1970s, do you think they'd ever outsourced the OS for their new brand of PCs to some kid called Bill Gates from Seattle w/ his garage company?

EXACTLY!

Too bad most people here aren't average surfers if there is such a thing.

:1orglaugh

I can't believe there is a post about ARS/Global's members areas. You get paid per signup and not recurring!

Have you been in Adult Movie Station lately?

Holy shit!! They have everything under the sun plus about every licensable DVD, users can either stream or download clips from each DVD.

And look at the picture section < it's massive.

I know for a fact that Global tracks everything including user feedback and really caters to the customer. Why can they do this?

Because ARS is busy catering to the webmaster and Global handles the customers.

Unlike other programs that try to do both, run affiliate programs and run paysites. Global and ARS can focus on what they do best.

If there are better members areas. Post them!



:thumbsup

maybe i'll have to check out their members area. a couple years ago it was beyond shit.

Well Said

agreed!! :thumbsup

I've never been inside of an ARS site, so I can't comment on their sites.

However, thanks to password sites, I've been in hundreds of member's areas and I was very disappointed in what I saw. I remember one that was a cheerleader site, and once inside the member's area all you got where panty feeds the our own Cheerleader feed. That's not a member's area, that's a collection of feeds.

No wonder why surfers complain.