Feeds & Paysites

[Xstr8guy]

What I can' understand is how a site can survive only from leased content alone. One of our most active board members has a site that has nearly every feed available. Each feed costs either X amount per member or X amount per gig of bandwidth. If you multiply those charges for every feed that you have and add in the cost of CC processing, hosting, rev sharing, aren't you cutting your profit to nil or even a negative $ amount?

[CJ-KJCash]

What I can' understand is how a site can survive only from leased content alone. One of our most active board members has a site that has nearly every feed available. Each feed costs either X amount per member or X amount per gig of bandwidth. If you multiply those charges for every feed that you have and add in the cost of CC processing, hosting, rev sharing, aren't you cutting your profit to nil or even a negative $ amount?

I would think hosting fees would be negligible. I mean if you are serving no content other than your tour, how much bandwith could you burn?

[Xstr8guy]

I would think hosting fees would be negligible. I mean if you are serving no content other than your tour, how much bandwith could you burn?

Oh yeah... what was I thinking? Lol.

[dannyz]

I would think hosting fees would be negligible. I mean if you are serving no content other than your tour, how much bandwith could you burn?

I *think* Xstr8guy is referring to the feed bandwidth bill, like with AEBN...I imagine it would get pretty expensive if the only thing you had to offer was AEBN feeds and getting billed at their rates from the bandwidth.

[Bec]

Hmm, yet another calculation to consider for what it'd cost to use them. I'd glossed over the additional BW costs above and beyond what the monthly fee would be.

[Xstr8guy]

I *think* Xstr8guy is referring to the feed bandwidth bill, like with AEBN...I imagine it would get pretty expensive if the only thing you had to offer was AEBN feeds and getting billed at their rates from the bandwidth.

Actually, I meant bandwidth to be in addition to the cost of the leased feeds. But you did remind me of a subtopic involving feeds.

Is it more cost effective for a paysite owner to use feeds that charge by bandwidth useage or per member charges?

[gaystoryman]

Frankly I think per member would be more cost effective as some of those guys can sure burn the bandwidth. THough I have to admit, I am not knowledgable about feeds and plugin, I got enough headaches trying to update a bloody newsletter or something.. :honest:

[dannyz]

Is it more cost effective for a paysite owner to use feeds that charge by bandwidth useage or per member charges?

I think feeds that charge by bandwidth are more fair then charging per member. I know that many of our members don't even look at the feeds since we give them so much other content, so for us paying per member would not be a good deal.

[JOELK]

Actually, I meant bandwidth to be in addition to the cost of the leased feeds. But you did remind me of a subtopic involving feeds.

Is it more cost effective for a paysite owner to use feeds that charge by bandwidth useage or per member charges?

I would say that it depends on how many members you have. For people just starting a site with little to no members it would probably be more cost effecient to pay for the bandwidth you use(per gig). For larger programs i would say that being charged by the member would be better because with high quality, updated feeds you will never have to pay the $2 a gig your members use.

[gaystoryman]

Given how cheap bandwidth is, makes one wonder why the overage is so expensive...

[basschick]

i had one paysite - a straight one - and we used hostedcontent as our entire movie collection. since you can link to each movie directly and use your own background, page layout, headers and footers, it worked great. at the time i did not know how to encode videos, so i found hostedcontent to be a real blessing.

i think one could pretty much do almost the same thing with feedsnow as long as they let you have multiple consoles.

as far as other feeds, i think these days your best bet unless you're planning to lease a LOT of them is to go with feeds that are entire sites. that way, you can call them bonus sites instead of feeds, and members seem happy about that.

[Bec]

i think one could pretty much do almost the same thing with feedsnow as long as they let you have multiple consoles.

as far as other feeds, i think these days your best bet unless you're planning to lease a LOT of them is to go with feeds that are entire sites. that way, you can call them bonus sites instead of feeds, and members seem happy about that.

Ok, must be a dense day for me, as I'm not following the multiple consoles concept here? You mean something that can be brought in like a page include for each niche?

Yea, I had a feeling full site "feeds" would be received/perceived differently if presented as bonus sites.

[JOELK]

Given how cheap bandwidth is, makes one wonder why the overage is so expensive...

exactly! if your plugin provider is charging overages change providers. You cant
track how much bandwidth is being used anyways so who's to say how much you really used.

[gaybucks_chip]

Given how cheap bandwidth is, makes one wonder why the overage is so expensive...

For the same reason you can buy 1000 minutes of cell phone airtime for $40 and then you pay 40 cents a minute for overage... it's a profit center

We have several different servers, each with a large base bandwidth allocation, and we have our content split so that we don't run over on any one server. As the traffic increases, we can further split the traffic onto other servers. I just wish I could do that with my cell phone

[gaybucks_chip]

One argument I haven't seen here is the issue of assets.

If you spend $12,000 a year on feeds, at the end of 5 years, you've spent $60,000 and have nothing to show for it.

If you spent the same $60,000 on buying exclusive content or paying models and shooting your own, you'd have between 50 and 200 sets of content that you own. The value of that intellectual property is a part of the net worth of your business, should you ever decide to sell it. If all you have is a domain name with a bunch of links and a monthly bandwidth bill, you won't have much, other than the traffic to the domain and whatever membership goodwill value to sell.