An average price for a paysite?
 

I'd like to start a discussion about paysites here. What are minimum requirements for a paysite (number of pics/vids sets, etc.)? What is the minimum price for start (the design, affiliate software, members area software, content protection software, hosting, billing services, etc.). I've never ran a paysite, so I'm really interested in your opinion. Share your thoughts please!

I forgot to add: no CCBill based!

maybe Paul Markham will give some insight

Great post, hopefully it gets some good replies.

the payment processor you choose probably wont have much of an impact on startup prices...

you could probably start up a decent site for anywhere between $10,000 and $100,000+ depending on whether you want to go exclusive or non exclusive.

Hit me up on ICQ if you want, I'm starting up a site right now and I love to discuss anything related to it

oh and you left out one of the most important areas, marketing:upsidedow

sorry I just realized you have free sites. content+hosting+advertising+design+affiliate software+..............
the question is what can you do for free or yourself?

I have paysites for sale that range from $20k to a lot more.

May not be the best answer but here it goes....

DEPENDS


There are alot of variables to what it costs to set up a paysite... Depends on what skills you have and can do.. What kinda site... what talent/content.... etc...

Anyone in the know will tell you theres no price to a paysite if you are making one yourself

depends totally on who you get to design

content being exclusive or not

hosting / processing

software (nats/mpa/ccbill system/epoch mpa)

PPS?

and the list goes on

Can someone add average prices to the list posted above?

And what else could be?You can only have verotel as you are not in EU.
Most of paysites are based either on ccbilll or epoch.

hey if you need a designer for this paysite, we have done A LOT... www.AdultDesign.com

Good Luck with your paysite...

such a vague question

a bump here... :)

It can cost anywhere from $5000 to $500000. It all depends on what you want to do... do you want to start a site with a shitload of unique, exclusive content featuring well-known models? Or do you want to go for an amateurish site with only a decent amount of non-exclusive content?

ive just made a full reality website for a client. it costed him 32k for 32 scenes of 20 minutes each with exclusive models.

so, if your not a big affiliate program, you will need to consider money for some marketing if you dont have any traffic.

everething would cost you between $50k to $60k on this strategy

good luck!

:1orglaugh:1orglaugh:1orglaugh

first thing I thought of haha

:2 cents:

What about if you have in house talent for content?

What if you could propvide most of your own content to get started. Then had some girl friends that wanted to start sites to and you traded content. or even join one, get 'em all...... these are not orginal ideas at all. Oh and your boyfriend is a webmaster and has a camera.

for that price I doubt if the models speak english

4terebytes plus fully managed dedicated server, 580 a month. Reliablehosting. Course, billed on the 95% so you still want to cap to make sure you never go over...

Now, lets say you have to bill by ccbill...$34.95 a month, about 15% (about $5.59 of that monthly charge for each member comes right off the top and also, lets say you depend on affiliates to send you traffic, (Most sites do) and those affiliates average 50% of the top... ($17.48)per sale and rebill. So 23.07 of your 34.95 membership is already taken leaving the site owner 11.88 of the remaining amount of the membership.

So it would take 49 paying members per month to break even and pay for the hosting of the site. Now, in order to take visa or mastercard, your also having to pay 1000 per year in their fee's. About 83 bucks a month. so your cost is really 663 a month.. so you need 56 paying members a month to break even.

Now you still have to buy your camera, buy a computer, buy a video camera, have internet service in order to upload you content. So lets go cheap here... Say you goto bestbuy and you can get the camera for around 500 bucks (you HAVE to have even the cheapest digital slr) the cheaper cameras just can not take pictures fast enough to keep up during a real photoshoot. and lets also say you are willing to wait so you can get away with a cheaper computer... something portable like a macbook or something... figure 1200 bucks for something that actually going to let you edit video etc.. The video camera? any Mini DV... so figure about 350 for that on the really cheapo end. OK, you still need to buy blamnk DV tapes for that video camera.. figure around 5 bucks a pop if you buy in bulk at sams club... and lets say you do a new shoot at least 1 time a month and do a cam show ever week, thats 5 tapes a month minimum so 60 tapes a year, $300 bucks. (you never use the same tape twice as you want to be able to keep each original tape as your backup) You also must have so storage if your going to actually be working with those tapes as capturing 1 hour of raw avi mini dv is going to burn up 12gig of drive space... you can pick up lacie drives right now for $350.00 for 1 terebyte. And just to be realistic here... let not forget the little things... like memory cards for the camera, readers to read those cards, cheapo hardware store shop lights for the actual lighting of the sets your shooting, and all the other little crap your going to need lets figure $500 bucks for all that Misc. cause your a real bargen hunter.

Software? well your a fucking super cheapo so you steal all of that from warez sites etc... Your not a cheapo? ok well go buy Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and adobe premier at there very least cause your going to be using all 3 of them hardcore. Another 1000.00 bucks there at least.

So lets break this all down for those that are having a hard time following...

camera- 500
video camera 350
computer 1200
tapes 300
storage 350
misc 500
software 1000

total = 4200 dollars. but we are doing this buy the year... so 350 bucks a month..

Wait... still have not actually built a site... you know a designer (right) no really... you need a actually good site design.. 1000 bucks on the cheapo end. (go with a company like Mansion and your looking around 3k) plus you need to have some sort of script that controls your content... cheapo.. 500bucks (Again back to mansion and their MAS software...3000 bucks) but we are poor fuckers so lets stay cheap. anti hacker software, anti hotlinking software and other programs you need to keep you server running nice and smooth... figure a budget of at least 400 bucks for that...

So on the cheapo end your talking 1900 bucks to actually build the site. (good luck with that btw)

So equipment and site design are now at 6100. again...Oh.. and you must pay the visa master card fee BEFORE you can start taking transactions...7100. Oh... and remember that server in the begining? did I mention that require a 1 year contract? 580x12 = 6960. you internet connection another 40 bucks a month. 480 a year...

So your startup cost? Starting from scratch... no members... $7720.00 including the first month server, first month internet access. (if your really running a business here you need at least a year worth of those money in bank to even really think about doing this... so lets cut the bullshit here and talk the real amount you would need to actually do this...

13540.00

you only make 11.88 per fucking member charge 34.95 remember... so you going to need 1140 paying members to break even the first year. (you still have not paid yourself.... or your webmaster as most girls actually only get a cut of the site, the webmaster who built it actually takes more than 50% (real life 70% or more for taking the risk) So how many members a month do you need to break even? 95. (spending all costs out for a year) which you cant do in real life.

ok... now lets say you run the site yourself... and want to make the what someone making oh... 8 bucks an hour would make before taxes. That equals out to about 16640 a year... thats another 1400.67 members your sites going to have to have over the year on top of the already required 1140 so 2541 or 211 a month. thats 7 members PER DAY. Add a girl working for a webmaster... you do the math.

Remember, these are just my numbers... others are going to be different.:thumbsup

Oh, and a quick note, the above numbers don't include any content, production fees, post production, management or taxes...

Reading it now.

The truth.

It depends on what you can do, what you have and which direction you want to take.

Gerco has listed a lot about shooting. He failed to emphasise, do you have the talent to shoot porn that people will buy? Truth is few do, those that do earn good money and those that don't lose a lot of money. Before you flame me, think about it. Few people in this business can earn $1,000 for a days work. Except good shooters.

OK back to the question.

Do you have enough good traffic?
Because if you do, you can make a site very cheap and make a good living. If you don't then you need affiliates and the costs sky rocket. You main cost is content. If you want good content for the surfer to sign up $20,000 worth of DVD will do the trick. If you want to have content to give to affiliates you might find a DVD license that allows you to give it to affiliates, but it will soon be saturated in the affiliates/free sites area on the net.

Unless you give us a lot of info about what kind of site you want to create it's tough to answer the question.

How much does a car cost? A 20 year old Skoda or a top of the range bran new Lamborgini? I probably can't even spell Lamborgini let alone afford one.

What I do know is you can put up a site for $5,000 and make a profit within a few months. And do it legally.

True Paul, I did take the cost break down from my own point of views and experiences, hard to speak of anything but. Content is king. If your fortunate enough to be able to shoot your own (like I was) and then find that your also lucky enough that people are willing to actually pay for the content you just shot (which again I was) then your cost go WAY down. There are a lot of ways to get content if your able to shoot. You can hire models, do content swaps where both, or all, parties share the resulting content and no money changes hands. Bring talent in as exclusive and build sites around them etc. BUT even having the content is not enough, I can list other sites that did similar content to mine, people that over the years I actually shot with, who have been gone for a long time now. This is a tricky and fickle business. Once you build a site, even if you do happen to get lucky enough to make it self sustaining, you then need to find ways to take it further, affiliate programs self marketing yada yada, if your a one man shop there is a point where you just can not grow that much more because there are just not enough hours left in the day for you to work, OR life comes at you and take more of your time away from site your building. It's hard to find people you can trust to work with as everyone is in this for the buck and nothing else. People talk a lot about the BRO factor, but it's a very real thing and for a good reason, for the most part this group has found a way to work together and make money together and there is a level of trust that has been achieved that most of us will never find. Once you find that you hold onto it.

Paul you, also spoke of saturation. Thats a 2 edge sword. It's hard to tell where the breaking point is for saturation. If your stuffs all exclusive and your in a nitch then you have to still worry about too much content actually getting out and becoming "old" If your buying content thats none exclusive, then your already fighting a losing battle, cause you have no branding and have to figure out how to make money with something that a LOT of other people are also tossing out in the web at the same time (and in the same places) Don't kid yourself here, the internet is NOT as big as you think it is.

And, after all is said and done, you still building something that could become worthless with the stroke of a pen in same lawmakers office. Understand these risks and work within the laws and your "should" be fine.

Sorry to be rambling here, I do find this to be a really good subject and wish more people from other points would chime in. Unfortunately, most in this business today are scared that if they actually talk about the inner workings that they will somehow lose money or someone will steal some great idea from them.

Some good points, but while it's half time let me reply to this one.

There are two areas to saturate content. One is the members area and the other the free surfers area. I'm not dealing here with micro niches, anything under 50 good sites and 50 small sites.

The situation with saturation in the members is this. To get content saturated for members it has to be good, it has to be inside lots of very successful members areas. It has to be sold time and time again.

Or the site owner is buying the oldest and cheapest content he could get his hands on. </sarcasm>

To saturate content in the free area it's a balance of how many reviewers of submissions for TGP and freesites have seen the content before and how much they remember. Can be exclusive content if you have too many affiliates submitting the same content.

Or the site owner is buying the oldest and cheapest content he could get his hands on. </sarcasm>

I'm in the business to saturate content. If site owners don't want it saturated they are welcome to stop screwing content providers into the ground everytime they buy a set. :1orglaugh

which doesnt really matter at all as long as they look hot and get hammered by big cocks..

If you're interested in real info, pls contact me ICQ 125184542

Andre

Share it with us.

I agree, share your points. why not let everyone see your side?

OMG the site in your sig is EXTREME!!

I didn't know you could stretch an a-hole that wide.... WOW

You can start small and simple for $5-$10k.. Exclusive content will push it to about $20k, and going balls to wall, a years worth of top quality content is about $50k total or push the limits of production/updates and it can easily be $50k+ a month.

Content is the expensive part, you can get exclusive scenes starting at $500.. $800 is average and going HD, longer, better looking girls, bigger dicks, ect.. can start pushing it $1k+ each.

- Processing $750 each for ccbill & paycom, rest are free.
- You can do DVD's for $250-$500 each, that's often cut already too. Or exclusive for $500-$1000 per scene. You need about 10 scenes to open with.
- If you need to cut the content, it's about $100 per dvd, it's less per scene but not sure how much.
- You can start with 1 server, 3mbps. No idea what that costs.
- NATS is $750 I think to setup, $150 a month. Or start with CCBill/Paycom programs at no charge.
- Design - $2k to cover inside, outside a little bit of promo materials. You can get this cheaper though I'm sure.
- Members protection, $100 from StrongBox
- CMS $350 - someone to set it up so it's done quicker $500.

This example has starting a site for less than $20k. On the low end of this, it's under $3k before content.

all the male models who were "hosting" the site presentation did spoke english.

the female models just the basic words

Bumping it as we need more business threads.

Gerco, thanks for all those details. one bump here...

anyone else?

A Most Excellent thread!

With all these content deals going on today, you can get one for an decent amount of money. It took me 2 years to build up a membersarea that made the members rebill. Because you need shitloads of content (or feeds), unless they'll cancel.

Owning paysites is a long journey of adding new content all the time. I would say that unless you really have something special or access to loads of content, then dont start an program unless you have tons of cash to promote it and make it look pro enough for webmasters to wanna promote it.

if you dont have too much money...the best would be to go onto micro niches... this way you wont have tons of competitors... and your success probability will be much higher

:2 cents:

Content is very important, but marketing is even more important....I know very HQ sites that don't have much members. And I know a lot of shitty sites, with TONS and TONS of sales....

If i where in you position and had never run a paysite i would start by promoting a good honest affiliate program to get the feel of what you can do to promote your own stuff. Do this before spending a cent because if you are unable to make money promoting a successful affiliate website chances are you will be even less succesful with your own ?

bump for more interesting posts

well hmm.. i am working on a "cheap amateur" site with exclusive content, it will only cost me around $4k, not counting the content as i shoot it myself with models i have "relations" with.. i have 10 models, not sure if that is enough to do a good startup with re-bills, anyone ??

there are a lot of good people here who gives savy advise, but 5 times more who wants your money for shitty advise/services, so watch out who you deal with.. let me know if i can assist you in any way. no cost execpt if you want content..

how is your sybian site coming along?