Tiral Membership Conversions

It seems like this thread already had its happy ending, but i want to throw in a few points from the sponsors side that are always missed by affiliates ... as with many areas, the lack of affiliate/sponsor understanding of each others business model is what causes so many problems in this industry.

while in this thread, everyone seems to be anti-trials, there are webmasters who can push 100 trials a day who would say exactly the opposite of everything mentioned in this thread ... a sponsor program has to balance a fine line between conversions and retention, webmasters earnings and sponsors earnings etc

when we launched the celeb sites, we did a lot of experimenting with trials and no trials, and in the end I gave up and left it at the place it converted best - because at the end of the day, MOST webmasters are more concerned with conversions than their bottom line. We had about 20% retention to start with, redid our members area and made it really 'full' looking and our retention went to 50% - no matter what we have done since we can't get it past 50%.

I know its stupid, its confused me for ages why this is the case, but how often do you hear someone saying 'wow man this site made me 5c per click' as opposed to 'wow man this site converts at 1/50' ?

The most joins I saw posted by an affiliate in this thread is less than 1 per day ... with industry average sites & pricing this equates to about $2 profit for the sponsor program per day, $14 per week, $56 per month, or $728 per year. As an affiliate, how much work would you do on *anything* that would make you $728 per year?

I'm not trying to devalue the work affiliates do, so please don't think this is mean as a 'fuck you if you dont make me any money' ... i'm trying to point out the realistic future of this business. How many brick and mortar companies allow 1000's of resellers to promote their product, with so few rules and no sales minimums etc? I'll tell you 1 ... amway ;-)

Something we all need to remember is that trials were invented not for the purpose of giving a surfer a trial of our website with the hope of them staying a member - they were designed back in the days when surfers forgot to cancel, and the 'oops i forgot' factor accounted for at least half of all rebills - maybe closer to 80% in the straight smut market.

Now that the element of 'oops i forgot' is no longer there, we are counting on our sites content being enough to keep someone a member when that person probably has joined several trials at once and cancelled before even starting to surf.

While the gay and womens markets have always been *better* for retention than the straight market, usually because the quality is higher and the sites have a personal touch, but how many gay programs are pulling 500 joins a day on a bad day?

There's 2 business models ... volume or quality ...
I can't think of anyone who is doing both well ...

1 more quick point ... we ask members for cancelation reasons when they cancel

i'll compile them into a format that i can post some day, but just to give you an indication of what surfers think $30 entitles them to


"Your site sucks, I couldn't save any of the pics"

"Its not my credit card"

"can you tell me _insert celeb name_ 's phone number?"

and here we are trying to figure out how to make these people stay members?! :wacko:

cj. - my paysite experiences are way different from yours.

we recently sent emails to all the cancelled members on a program i work with. the responses that we got from multiple people included:

i can't afford the monthly price
your site doesn't have enough updates
your site doesn't have enough content
i can't see the videos
i didn't like the site

those all seem like good reasons to cancel a membership. we didn't get one weird email back, actually. maybe there are more of the odd responses with celeb, i wouldn't know.

and i'll tell ya what - i've seen sites that don't update and at least 95% of the members quit.

i also promote several sites that have 50% or better conversion from trial to monthly. that makes trials very useful - especially if you buy search engine traffic and use a price in yout listing. you will get around three to four times the signups using a trial price in the ad as a full month price, so you definitely make more money that way.

Quote:

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Originally posted by cj.
The most joins I saw posted by an affiliate in this thread is less than 1 per day ... with industry average sites & pricing this equates to about $2 profit for the sponsor program per day, $14 per week, $56 per month, or $728 per year. As an affiliate, how much work would you do on *anything* that would make you $728 per year?

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A couple of things.

(1) Workin Men Movies only started their affiliate program about the first week of December, so whatever stats you're reading about are new. And I can't speak for the others, but I've been busier than hell, so about all I've been able to do for the site is put up a few banners. I haven't really been able to do anything about pushing traffic.

(2) I think there's a big difference in volume between the programs you're talking about and the ones that we're discussing here. Workin Men Movies is a sub-niche of a niche within a market. It's redneck and working guys who fit within the hairy men/bear niche who fall within the gay market. That's already whittling down the interested surfer numbers.

(3) I think straight and gay traffic wants and buys different things. I cannot sell those mega-conglomerate program sites to save my life. My traffic isn't into that templated, Las Vegas crazy strip like design, "we'll give you millions of pics" kind of thing. But I can sell very targeted, nicely designed sites, within a particular niche. And if I have 20 of those that are all selling one membership a day, that changes your perspective, doesn't it?

(4) Clearly, in the case of Workin Men Movies, the trial wasn't working for anyone's benefit except the surfers. It had to go.

Cheers
Dzinerbear

D-bear, you beat me to it! But I wasn't going to be as diplomatic as you were, lol.

CJ, it would be impossible for a single webmaster to push 100 trials to Workin Men Movies in one day. In the big picture of the gay website market, WMM will never be a big time program. This is a labor of love for Cheeks and potentially for his affiliates.

As wonderful and unique as this content is, it will never appeal to anything but a minor percentage of the gay market. But for those of us (me, d-bear, basschick) that are HUNGRY for sponsors like this, WMM is a godsend!

We have tried to send our precious traffic to big-time sponsor programs. But have discovered that we were insulting those surfers with generic tours and templated members areas with inappropriate content. When we find a sponsor site we like, we love and protect it and do everything possible to make it a success.

i think it is possible for one webmaster to push 100 sales per day to any program. is it likely? no - but it is entirely possible.

as far as most big programs, their straight sites suck and their gay sites suck. they very rarely seem to understand or care about the niches their they make their money from their exit and enter consoles, their cross sales and especially very aggressive upsells in their member area. in the case of at least one program, they even have exits on their paid member area. and that is all money they do not split with their affiliates.

as far as wmm, if cheeks offered pics - not just small vidcaps, but full sized vidcaps from his originals - to not only us webmasters to promote his site, but also to his surfers so they'll have something else to enjoy, that would be very useful. i have mentioned this to thetwink - we'll see what happens.

I appreciate the difference in the straight and gay markets, and that the program used as the example in this thread is a specific niche, but the business model is the same ... paysites, subscriptions, trial memberships - the audience is surfers. there are a lot of similarities between the gay market and the straight market, even if the gay market focuses more on quality, its still selling porn to jaded surfers.

>CJ, it would be impossible for a single webmaster to push 100 trials to Workin Men Movies in one day.

Xstr8guy, I disagree ... if 1/25 is the conversion (which someone quoted here) that's only 2500 targeted hits.

all those surfers who sign up to the generic site programs might signup to this type of site (sounds like it could have a big curiousity factor) if they could find it over the others, with 1000's of webmasters pushing them ... hence the business model controls how many webmasters are going to promote your site, and therefore how many signups your program gets.

What a program can afford to pay per signup is controlled by the business model elements like trial, exits, type of traffic, volume, retention etc ... and what you pay per signup is what brings in the big or small groups of webmasters.

basschick, yes we had lots of those same reasons as well, but what exactly do they mean?

i can't afford the monthly price - 90% mean i never had any intention of paying for this because we get the same reason on $5 a month sites
your site doesn't have enough updates - how many is enough?
your site doesn't have enough content - how much is enough?
i can't see the videos - legit reason that's solvable
i didn't like the site - why?

even sites with a million pics and videos will be 'not enough content' for some ... we have had *exactly* the same reasons for cancellation for the past 7 years, they aren't reasons, 90% are excuses for 'i just dont want to pay for porn'

We haven't even touched on issues like cc declines, 56k modems and trial abusers ...

Taking into account all of the reasons for people *not* to pay for porn these days, what retention would you think reasonable to promote a site with a trial? Does anyone calculate their traffic in earnings per click to do the comparisons of programs?

Just think yourselves lucky you are in this market!! LOL no matter how bad the numbers seem, this market will only get better. Our generic straight sites hit 20% retention more than a year ago so we stopped bothering, haven't updated members area in a year and still get 20% retention just on movies and pics & some upsell feeds.

I guess 20% is the 'forgot to cancel' element ...

we're seeing less than 5% forgetting to cancel on two different programs with very different content, markets and niches.

i've seen programs like naughtyamerica and fetishaffiliates hold onto members really well - i guess however many videos they have, it's enough ;-) also although each site updates only once a week, you get access to all the sites, so you have more than 7 updates a week for each program.

when i averaged out the value per trial of each signup for naughtyamerica, it was over $32 for me, which means each join (trial or otherwise) is worth $60. that's not counting the cross sells on the join page and any upsells in the member area that i don't get part of.