MarkTiarra

One advantage of being a designer is I get to draw from hundreds of people's experiences on what's working and what's not rather than just my own corner of the world. What I've seen with plug-in vs. exclusive is this:

1) You can absolutely make money doing it with plug-ins but you do have to follow the "everything and the kitchen sink" approach as mentioned above. You also have to organize the content in such a way that the stuff with the best response is getting featured properly and the rest is just to wow the member with options.

2) Exclusive content helps but it's by a measurable amount and if your cost of producing that content is very high, you will have to have quite a bit of money to float you until you reach a return on investment. Also exclusive stuff is much more effective when it's MPEG content rather than pictures.

So, based on my experiences anyway, I'd say that the decision to go exclusive is a financial one and that having plugins in the site too never hurts. You can make plenty of money with no exclusive content but you will make more if you have it. So if you're budget is smaller or you can't find a way to shoot exclusive stuff cheaply, start with plugins and reinvest earnings until you can add some exclusive stuff. If you can instead find a way to shoot your own material right from the start, do everything you can to make it cost effective or be prepared to need a good sum of money to float you until you turn profit.

Final comment: I do keep data wherever possible on user response to plug-ins so if you want to find out which ones I'm seeing are having the greatest impact on retention , shoot me an email.

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