Here's the latest post I wanted to share from the Paysite Blog. It's been awhile but I said most of what I had to say on the topic til now so here goes... (For more check out:
http://www.guaranteeddesigns.com/blog/).
2009 is here, the economy has been rough to say the least and the proliferation of “tube” sites has had as dramatic a negative impact on paysite sales as the advent of TGP/MGP sites ever did. If I take a look across the board of sites I own as well as clients reporting into me with numbers, sales are down (or growth curves for those who are in building stages) as much as 33%. The sectors hit least hard by this lie in three groups:
1) Cam sites.
2) Dating/social networking sites.
3) VOD sites.
Why? With the first and second cases I think it’s mostly a matter of it being something you can’t really get for free en masse and so it’s still a viable sell. With the third case, VOD type sites, I think the answer is a bit more complicated…
First is obvious issue of the economic factor whereby people on a tight budget much prefer to pay a fixed one time fee for exactly the scene they want and nothing more. The less obvious issue is that, as the Internet has matured, the average experience of the visitor to sites is much higher than it used to be. Just a few years ago we always saw sales spike after Christmas largely because of the influx of newbies with new Holiday gift computers and net accounts. The day of the newbie is past.
So what to do about this? Starting your own cam or dating site and having it be any good is quite the undertaking. Not a bad deal if you can do it, but not on the top of my low effort for high return list by any means. What I’m looking to do in the next month or two is this:
1) Offer on exit from my paysites the ability for the visitor to download (or just stream) scenes or sets individually for a one time fee. It’s an entire secondary sales pitch to the prospective client that wasn’t there before. Using a bit of software like
http://www.phantomcart.com/ allows you to do this quite easily and still track it for affiliates using NATS or many of the major billers.
2) Offer some of my older/archive content for free with the access being controlled by simply entering an email address and then from within that “members” area, upselling to cam sites, dating sites, VOD and my own VOD versions of my sites. This model has been recently worked on by a friend of mine to great success and now I’ve had a couple others telling me positive stories as well. It makes me some nervous to offer say a buck an email not knowing yet for sure what the average return will be per “member” but that avg. can be figured out with internal test traffic first.
The times change and if we try to use the same business models from 2000 in them, then we’re not going to be around long. I hope these ideas end up being the solution for this next period of time. We’ll certainly see by the time it thaws out in NY here.
As always, I wish you good luck and good profit! I hope these ideas are useful to you.
