Why do I want a paysite?

A couple of days ago in another thread xstr8guy paid me a compliment and said that he thought that my site was good enough that the next level for me is a paysite. (Thx, BTW.)

And I posed several questions, but because they were buried in another thread, they never got addressed, so I thought I'd resubmit them.

I've certainly thought about starting a paysite, but then, I also think, you know what right now I have it pretty good. I put up the sites and and MANcheck pays me pretty much half of the sign up fee or rebilling rate. That's pretty sweet.

I don't have to answer e-mail from people who have lost their passwords. (Or hire someone to do it.)

I don't have to handle bitchy complaints from people who have been rebilled. (Or hire someone to do it.)

I don't have to hire a programmer to deal with all of the paysite programming.

I don't have to set up a company in the U.S. to deal with stupid laws.

I don't have to pay VISA $800.

It seems to me that running a paysite is a big pain in the ass. Running an AVS site, MANcheck gets all of the hassle.

I don't have to pay webmasters half of my money to do what I'm doing now.

And I don't have to constantly babysit webmasters that are trying to rip me blind by stealing my traffic.

And then in another thread I was just reading where Lee talked about a lot of the costs involved, it looks like it'll easily cost between $3-5,000 to set one up.

So, I'm wondering: Exactly why do I want to run a paysite again? Am I missing something.

Cheers
Dzinerbear

Because..

In the long run, if you can overcome that list of hassles..

It really is an envigorating way to make money :)

Not to mention you get to go to photoshoots and actually tell the models what you want them to do LOL

Regards,

Lee

I have to agree with Lee about it. Since opening our sites I've had headach's a lot, but I wouldn't change it for the world.

Okay, I'm not getting it.

If, as a paysite, I have to give probably close to half of my money away to webmasters and billing companies and programmers, what's it in for me?

And who says you have to be a paysite to shoot your own content? As soon as I get a couple of bucks, I'll be doing that. And I have no plans on leaving MANcheck and going paysite. I'll watermark the stuff with something like Digimarc and track down the stealers with their spidering service.

I mean, I'm not stupid, I get the math that as a paysite I can probably charge $14.95 to $24.95 monthly as opposed to MANcheck's $19.95 for a year. But what's the retention of a paysite, probably a couple of months, right?

It's still not adding up for me. I'd love some more discussion on this.

Cheers,
Dzinerbear

Dzinerbear, I agree with you, opening up paysites is a huge initial and ongoing workload not to mention expense. If you are happy with what you are doing now and making enough money to keep you content, then keep it up.


cheers,
Luke

I guess a big reason for starting your own pay-site would be... are the AVS's going to be around much longer? Over the past year, there has been a lot of talk about their demise and/or reorganization. You know me, Dzinerbear, I'm a big champion of the AVS system, but I would sleep better at night knowing that I was in charge of my own destiny. Leaving my future in the hands of some company that may disappear tomorrow does not offer me comfort. Look what happened with AdultCheck. I know that you are a big supporter of MC, but the only advice I can offer you is: Don't put all of your eggs in 1 basket!

Also, I would like to get paid for all of my sign-ups and rebills... not just the one's that XYZ company feels like paying me for! And right now... I feel like XYZ company is fucking me hard... with no lube!

Hey xstr8guy and Luke

Thanks for the input. And xstr8guy, you're right on the money. I've thought, too, about the what ifs. It's scary to think that it could all just disappear overnight. So, that's a big consideration.

Also, the AVS will always do what is best for them. And if VISA says jump, they will say "how high." What choice do they have? In the process, like you say, we get screwed without lube.

Still, I'm sure paysite owners have their own horror stories and problems. (It'd be nice he we could get some of them shared here, so we could all learn from them.)

I don't have the resouces right now to take that course of action, so I have to maintain the status quo. Plus, I'm overwhelmed with design work at the moment.

Perhpas in six months I'll be able to consider it more seriously.

Some articles on this issue would be helpful.

Cheers
Dzinerbear

You know the BIGGEST advantage over oning your own paysites (with aff program) than not is the sheer amount of extra traffic you will be able to make money off too. Im actually surprised no one else mentioned this.

Whilst it is true you are paying out a decent amount of the income you make on the paysite, you are making a lot more of it.

Ultimately though i guess it is don to you as to whether or not you want to try your hand at paysites and, in all honesty, if you are doing AEN sites and they work, why not stick to it or start pushing premium AEN sites.

Regards,

Lee

All great points here. But I will doing my own paysites from now on. It's a pain in the ass, it is. But I would rather be making that money myself than sending it all to a somewhere I'm not sure is going to work. See, Dziner, you have a cash flow coming in from what you're doing. So I can totally understand where you're coming from in your wondering.

Xstr8guy's post says a lot. It's what I started to write before I refreshed the page LMAO

If you build a pay site, you wouldn't have to share a dime with webmasters. You wouldn't even have to open a webmaster program if you decided. You can send your own lines of traffic to it.

Before we openned Stud Money, I had small paysites all over the place. No one promoted them except me. It was my traffic and all my money. This used to be traffic I sent to other programs but decided to turn them to my sites. I, also, found that it converted better and retained longer than I was seeing with others.

There are a lot of headaches invovled in owning your own paysite. Content, feeds, news - things to make your members retain longer... It's a bitch. And yes sometimes I think I should just send all my traffic to someone elses program to make money off of them. Let them worry about that stuff... but then I realize it's mine and getting $35 for a signup doesn't compare to what I'm making on my own in the long run.

My two cents...

Gary

My horror story is about billing...personally i went through several (pswbilling, acpay/egspay, probilling and verotel) before finally getting hooked up with ccbill. With every processor I ended up losing loads of member rebills and worse than that, I originally set up my affiliate program with ACPay so I lost that too. When they closed I was stuck finding a new processor and had to close the affiliate program too. And since we are based in Australia, I was down for about 2 months before finally getting things all approved and set up again. All up, it took about 6 months before things started rolling again. That was 6 months with close to no income from my paysites, even though the costs kept rebilling every month.

I have also seen the same thing happen with several of my clients when globill and globosale went under.

Anyone else got any horror stories?

cheers,
Luke

Quote:

---

pswbilling, acpay/egspay, probilling and verotel

---

What? You never used Globill yourself? ;) With a track record like that, I would have quit!

I got hit on GloBill... but I saw it coming and did nothing about it. So the horror was of my own doing. Since it wasn't my sole income, I closed the members areas, immediately.

As I was looking at PSW (Ugh!)... We decided to work on DILF. The whole game changed for us then. I wasn't going to play around again, so we all decided to go immediately to CCBill.

And as they say the rest is history... I should have done that to begin with but hind sight is 20/20. LMAO

I do chalk it up to experience... at the time I was one guy doing way too much. Got a real lesson in priorities.

GA

So... just how difficult is it to start and run a paysite? I have the money to pay the Visa/MC fees, plenty of content and a reasonable amount of time to invest. I'm just not sure if my niches are popular enough to generate a decent income.

Just bumped a thread for you XG :)

One that Bec started a week or two ago there is some great info in the thread if you can digest it all should give you an idea of how complicated it may or may not be for you to set up a paysite :)

Although, to be honest, if you are going to start a site fo your on use only then it shouldnt really be to difficult at all IMHO.

Regards,

Lee

Most people who lose their passwords email the billing company, but if they email you, it takes a minute to login and pull it out and paste it into an email.

Rebills complaints don't go to you, they go to the billing company. The did the charge, they deal with that shit. It's why you pay them 12% of every transaction :)

They do the paysite programming as well. It's why you pay them 12% of every transaction.

As far as Visa/Mastercard, there is a US-based processor that doesn't have the fees, and they're legit. But, all indications are that AVS' will eventually fall under the Visa umbrella and each webmaster will have to pay the fees.

For me, the biggest problem with my paysite(s) was having to continually update them with fresh content. Gay content providers, for the most part, charge 2-3 times what the str8 providers charge, though I can't figure out why.

I never had a webmaster referral program, I used my own traffic and 6+ years worth of SE traffic to feed them. At the time, I didn't even use a third-party processor, I used my own merchant account (this was before Visa decided to play God) so the fees were 3% on each transaction. I had a simple billing interface/password program that my website admin built for me (wasn't expensive) and everything worked fine.

You make a hell of a lot more with your own sites than with AVS, and for most, isn't money the bottom line?

There are SO many niches in the gay market not being utilized it's sad. Gary hit it right on the head, there are millions of single-girl websites, amateur type, but how many gay ones?

Quote:

---

Originally posted by Dzinerbear


I don't have to answer e-mail from people who have lost their passwords. (Or hire someone to do it.)

I don't have to handle bitchy complaints from people who have been rebilled. (Or hire someone to do it.)

I don't have to hire a programmer to deal with all of the paysite programming.

I don't have to set up a company in the U.S. to deal with stupid laws.

I don't have to pay VISA $800.

---

Hi guys, haven't been around for a while.

Just wanted to say... life was easier before I became a paysite owner. It is damned hard work!! I guess I'm in a slightly different position because I'm writing new stuff for it all the time, but it's still something you have to constantly look after.

And in the first six months, you really have to nurse it to get it on its feet :)

The benefits... what are they again? LOL

Actually, it's essentially peace of mind, you know that every signup is yours, and if you work hard at making the members area good, you EARN those rebills, and keep them coming in.

I think if you're happy doing free and AEN sites, keep it up. :)

you only have to give half the money to webmasters who send the sales you didn't make. you still get all your own money - plus this entire other crop of sales you get half of.

Thanks for all of the great feedback, it pretty much confirmed my suspicions.

I think a paysite is in my future at some point, but down the road.

I don't have the financial resources to make that leap at the moment. We're still recovering from both of us losing our jobs last year.

I also feel like I have a heap more stuff to learn that will be valuable down the road. Until a few weeks ago, I felt like I was pretty much going at this alone. But in the last month or so, I've been contributing more here, making contacts and friends, and learning heaps of stuff through trial and error about marketing my site.

I feel like I've been building a network of resources, peers, and friends. It does take a while on these boards, I guess there are so many people looking to make a quick and easy buck that are filing through here, it takes a while before the regulars are "convinced" that you're serious.

And finally, I'm afraid that a paysite will end up eating into my creative time. I enjoy the time that I sit writing content for my site. Every time I work on a new gallery of pictures, I'm thinking: What's the angle on this guy? What would I like to do with him? What can I write that will get people so hot that they'll pop a nut to get in.

I'm sure I'll still be able to do that after I launch a paysite, but I'm just looking at how jam packed my day is and wondering where I'd find the time for all of the extra work.

So, thanks to everyone who contributed on this post. I appreciate the comments and feedback. And as a result, I'm not saying "never," just "not yet."

Cheers
Dzinerbear

Quote:

---

Originally posted by Xstr8guy
What? You never used Globill yourself? ;) With a track record like that, I would have quit!

---

Yeah, you are too funny (he says bitterly!) I know my track record has been horrible, that's why its nice to be with CCBill now!

cheers,
Luke