Are Paysite Prices Too Cheap?
 

For years the thinking was lower your monthly subscription price thus making the purchase easier for more people to make. Keeping the price low also meant Members may overlook such a small charge and rebill forever.

Times change tho - and prices for everything have skyrocketed except for paysites! Last time I checked the cost for video production, server costs and overall operational costs have not gone down yet paysite pricing options have stagnated. Why?

Coming from the music industry I saw firsthand the effects of de-vauling your product. Apple iTunes came along and trained everyone to value a single song at $0.99. So instead of buying an entire physical CD or vinyl album at $8-15 people just paid a dollar for the song they wanted (or worse, downloaded it for free thinking it's so cheap what's the harm?). These days with Spotify the cost to consumer is even less. Any wonder then why the music industry is almost completely dead?

Has anyone played around with their pricing options, making them higher and seeing the overall gain or loss? My experience is that if someone is motivated to buy they will do so as long as the price is 'reasonable'. Those on the fence will probably stay with inferior free clips on tube sites.

Example: $119.00 for an entire year vs. $29.95 monthly recurring. The yearly option is a $240 savings or 1/3 the cost of the monthly recurring. WTF? Time to raise prices. What say you?

I increased my recurring price after trial conversion and seeing better retention. More money + More retention = woo!

Testing prices should be a regular behavior, not once in a decade. Also different traffic types will respond differently to different pricing. Discount offers will need a different model than trial offers than monthly than yearly.

Porn is free like air

Low entry prices and high rebills work for me. Regardless of what your costs are and the value you receive your content to be worth, surfers are cheap.

That's why I like cams, let the subscriber decide how much to spend and how often. :winkwink:

The cost of a dick raises

i think it´s strange "adult" in general hasn´t risen with inflation...

In the UK, escorts charged about 100 quid for half hour & 150 for the hour, since the year 2000. Amateur porn stars were paid about 150, maybe 200 an hour shoot in the UK, the fees are still about the same, maybe slightly higher for the pornstar, but then the length of shoot time is longer, so maybe 300 to 400, but then this would be for 2 hour shoot as it´s less rushed, shall I say, more professional these days.

20 years later, the economy and living expenses have gone up twice this...

and yes, the fee for a subscription on our sites was $24.99 a month back in 2010 & now, i´m still charging $24.99 for a monthly subscription.


Problem is, plenty of free porn too...


was porn & the adult business over priced back in 2000, has it aligned now? :2 cents:

An interesting marketing fact is that Stella Artois was cheap and did not sell, they increased the price a lot and because it was expensive people viewed it as quality and sales shot up.

raise the prices and do some testing its the only way to know

This is exactly what I am doing. I am keeping the monthly subscription the same but raising the multi-month options. To go from $29.95 a month down to less than $10 a month just because someone buys a yearly Membership is not making sense anymore.

I am giving it the last three months of this year to test and see the results. :)

agreeing with you, although, the sales option to drop the $10 monthly gave us many extra sales last month...

it´s a great idea to do sales occasionally, like a summer sale blast, $10 this month...


no rebills, just the join, then the full $24.99 again!


I´ll be offering a $15 for Christmas & maybe a $10 for Halloween week :thumbsup

Having the sales option is one of the reasons for raising the prices. I will be sending out emails via YNOT Mail with sales and doing Specials throughout the year. The psychology behind changing the pricing is this:

$29.95 monthly (rebills at same price) = $1 day
$69.95 for 3 months (rebills at same price) = $23 a month, or a 25% discount. A nice savings but not big enough for many to choose it while enough price difference to drive the basic monthly. May forget to cancel.
$109.95 for 6 months (rebills at same price) = $18 a month, or a 40% discount. A better savings so many will choose this and hopefully forget to cancel.
$199.95 yearly one time only = $16.50 a month, or a 45% discount with the added benefit of not having to remember to cancel.

I used to offer (and may bring back if this new pricing structure is a disaster) a one-time only option at $34.95 for one month. Many choose this option but (obviously) rebills are less than they could be. So my thinking is we try this for awhile and see how it goes.

For Affiliates: better rebills mean higher payouts, and if a Member chooses the yearly option you would now get a cool $100! Win-win-win (you, Members, me).

:thumbsup:thumbsup

Ask Metallica how it worked for them...monthly is a one time expense for the customer and people with money are more diligent at watching out for rebills? Crossed checks are a thing of the past and charge backs are in the consumers court, CC companies have wised up as well :2 cents:

Agreed - but this is more about valuing your product more and, at the same time, increasing revenue to keep up with inflation, etc. Time (and testing) will tell how the revenue flows.

ANNUALS - they have a market, but its not new fans. i suggest pushing annual to recently cancelled members.

PRICING & INFLATION - yea we all got fucked by the tubes and free porn. if that hadn't happened, our pricing would have increased with inflation. if people are giving a similar product away for free, there's only so much you can charge.

PREMIUM - there's a market but you better have the best paysite that ever existed.

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