Originally Posted by Paul Markham

Thoughts?

Any site converting 1-33 (97%) is in a very very micro niche and gets 100 surfers a week. Even in the glory days sites couldn't convert at 99%. More like 1-300 on the best sites (99.3%)

Yes the day of forcing customers to buy what we want him to buy are over. Whether you have the greatest site ever or a POS site. The customer sets the pace today.

We offer 3 day trials recurring at $2.95 and 3 day memberships at $5 and the normal monthly recurring and non recurring. The short term non recurring is the most popular. The same members come back time after time. So they seem to like what we have and they like to come back when it suits them.

A point to remember. If the "experts" in online porn had a clue. The online business wouldn't be in a slide down. It would be climbing.

Originally Posted by Paul Markham

Good posts and some good comments.

I posted on another board asking the question if most of online only porn can actually afford to have good recurring sites. My belief is the majority can't, the profit simply isn't there for most.

Forget about the few sites who today profess to have lots of money. And think about theses figures. They are used as an example, so don't shoot the actual figures before you think about it.

A good solo girl scene shot by a good shooter, with some innovation, imagination and porn quality will cost quality will cost $1,000 per scene. Unless the site owner shoots it and only a few site owners can shoot good porn. Updating 1 set or video a day will cost $50 per update.

50 scenes = $50,000
30 updates = $15,000 a month.

So the first months content costs $65,000 and then $15,000 recurring.

At a monthly membership of $30 and allocating $5 to the content only got the site that means. 1,000 members recurring to pay for the initial content and 100 a day for the updates has to go to the content budget.

Very few start up sites can achieve that without massive promotion and that costs money. By the time the site is up and launched fully functioning what are ALL the costs after the first month?

Someone with more skill at this than me need to chip in here.

I've spoken to enough big time sponsors who would of liked to buy exclusive content from us, but simply couldn't afford it. They could and did afford to buy from people who were shooting a lot cheaper.

This effected conversions and retention. But it was cheaper to throw tons of traffic at a site rather than build a site that would really work.

Look at the few solo girl sites that do work well, Alsscans, Abbey Winters, Met Art and a few others.

Mostly we expected customers to keep recurring when we didn't give them good enough reasons to. The long time recurring member is a rare breed and not the norm. Long term = over 1 year.