Help! Business partner is fighting removal of DRM

ok, so many of you piped in and told me to get rid of DRM. I couldn't agree with you all more!

However, my business partner, Rich, who thinks removing DRM will give everything away for free forever is trying to find a way, as usual, to fight me on the decision to remove DRM.

His questions are the following:

I am wondering if we can all make more sales by giving your traffic different purchasing options.

For instance, do you think that it might be an idea to consider offering:

1. Monthly Membership (as is now)
2. Pay-Per-Minute (like VOD)
3. Download To Own (pay like $5 per scene)

What are your thoughts on this?


Now, back to me. I think all the affiliates will shun taking 50% rev share on a $5 scene download. In addition, it will give the consumer the ability to nail us down as Beyonce and Britney Spears got nailed down by i-tunes. For example, if Ms. Spears does not produce a good 7 hits on her new "album" she is losing money. Virgin Megastore (and all DVD retailers) are going out of business because of i-tunes. Ms. Spears or Beyonce rarely sell a full CD at $14.95 retail anymore, they are only selling their strongest hits at $1.29 a pop! I also think education porn consumers on what DRM actually is will make them think twice about choosing a recurring membership.

Am I making any sense?

Who do you defend? Me, Collin or my business partner Rich?

Sorry Colin but overall I support your business partner Rich. There is a reason he is your "business" partner…

Having as many different purchase options and revenue streams for the same content is always a good idea.

As I stated in your other posting…you need to ask yourself is it worth $29.95 to allow users to download and own all your content forever? If you are comfortable with that scenario then go for it. But, remember once you go down that road you can’t ever go back.

Personally, I think you should consider the following:

Monthly memberships with all you can eat streaming plus limited weekly downloads that rotate so that not all your content is available for download at any one time. Make the user stay at least 6 months or a year before they can have access to download your entire library of content. Consider only offering smaller resolution or iPod size downloads instead of full resolution clips. Membership sites are “rental” sites in my mind….you are renting the content for viewing, not selling it outright.

PPM- PPM is going to be harder for a smaller site with a limited amount of content. Users generally are not willing to buy in when there is limited content, they prefer to buy minutes for a wallet from sites like AEBN that have tons of content to chose from. For PPM you should try and partner with as many major PPM sites as possible. But, hold back your new content for at least 3-6 months for your site only before releasing it to other PPM sites. It's your content and you deserve to get first shot to make the most money from it.

Download to Own: Now here is where I think you can and should remove DRM. If someone is “buying” the file outright, not “renting” it, then they should get it without DRM. We are selling DRM free iPhone size DTO on our site and I am pretty happy with the results. With DTO you are “selling” the clip to the user, not “renting” it to them. Similar to selling them a DVD that they own outright.

You need to decide if you want your membership site to be a “rental” or a “sell” business model.

Good luck with whatever you decide to do!

I am trying to figure out though why so many people are telling me to remove DRM. I really believe in DRM. I scrub the "naughty" sites 3 times a week and the only stolen content is ripped from DVDs and not from my site.

I do see a TON of Sean Cody stuff out there though and so many other companies that seem to not have a person to scrub and send cease and desist letters out (they work actually, and I'm sure you know that well).

Once again, thanks to you, and the other guy who wrote in on the subject, to give another view of why not to remove DRM.

-Collin

We used to offer all or content for download. In Jan 09 we moved to a high quality FLV streaming of all our content in 3 sizes. Which most of our customers preferred, since there is no waiting or buffering. Flash plays on every computer and the video quality is excellent. To please the customers who wanted downloads we offer a full length Wolff Production DVD available for download every month ( 75-120 min in length featuring 4- 8 models) As Keith suggested we keep 6 full length DVD's in our download area at any given time. every month when we add a new title we remove the one we added 6 months ago. I have 35 full length exclusive DVD titles to date and release 4-5 new ones every year. So there is a new full length DVD every month ( valued at $29-$49) to keep the members recurring. It's worked well for us. Joins and re-bills were up in 2009 even in this economy.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by markwolff

We used to offer all or content for download. In Jan 09 we moved to a high quality FLV streaming of all our content in 3 sizes. Which most of our customers preferred, since there is no waiting or buffering. Flash plays on every computer and the video quality is excellent. To please the customers who wanted downloads we offer a full length Wolff Production DVD available for download every month ( 75-120 min in length featuring 4- 8 models) As Keith suggested we keep 6 full length DVD's in our download area at any given time. every month when we add a new title we remove the one we added 6 months ago. I have 35 full length exclusive DVD titles to date and release 4-5 new ones every year. So there is a new full length DVD every month ( valued at $29-$49) to keep the members recurring. It's worked well for us. Joins and re-bills were up in 2009 even in this economy.

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Great information, thanks for sharing!

The main reason you should remove DRM is because surfers do not like it... Because it has been abused by so many other companies over the years.

Take a look at any of the large review sites, the ones that get hundreds of thousands of surfers hitting them every single day, any site that has DRM protection on their content scores lower, has worse reviews and the review site owners tell the surfer that DRM is a bad thing.

Keep DRM on your site if you want to turn lots of potential customers away, if you dont mind losing money, keep it.

I also know there are a lot of affiliates who wont promote sites that utilize DRM technology because of the same reasons i mentioned above so, not only are you losing out on potential new customers by using DRM, you are also turning away a lot of affiliates who could send you traffic and sales.

DRM was a great idea and like all great ideas the adult industry ran with it and totally fucked its usage up.

Regards,

Lee

Note that we don't have DRM per se. Flash just makes it harder to download and save, but not impossible of course. I think it's a good balance - you make it more convenient for the customer because flash streams better. But you don't have the nuisance of full DRM.