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:
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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.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.Originally Posted by Xstr8guy
Given how cheap bandwidth is, makes one wonder why the overage is so expensive...
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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.
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.
exactly! if your plugin provider is charging overages change providers. You cantGiven how cheap bandwidth is, makes one wonder why the overage is so expensive...
track how much bandwidth is being used anyways so who's to say how much you really used.
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
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.
Couldn't the advent of feeds simply be that many are simply in a hurry to generate revenue, and are taking an easier road than shooting their own content? I would think someone would have to spend a lot of time shooting enough content to keep the same attention span that numerous feeds can deliver. :coffee:
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Hello people,
Boyfunk, i think you made a great point about the long term costs of feeds vs. shooting/owning your own content. You know, you can live and die by feeds. I actually think they are sort of old school in themselves now. The branded content sites are really pulling away from the pack by offering original content and updating at least weekly.
Artist/Painter and Webmaster of Huskyhunks.com.
I think it is always better to have your own content and will have something to show for it like BoyFunk pointed out. On the other hand there is only so much you can shoot and update. That is why we decided to mix things up with exclusive content and leased feeds and give members the best of both worlds. It seems to work really well but you have to pick your feeds carefully. We expect the feeds to have regular ontime updates and have good content. Our members really like the exclusive content as well as the leased feeds. I hope that helps.
Mark
* IntenseCash.com - If you can't convert us you better look for a new job!
I understand what you're saying, but in a startup situation, I can see a couple hundred bucks a month for feeds buys a lot more movies the members can see than I could buy for the same $200 in real content. Eventually, membership revenue reinvested into actual on site content would be the better value, but at what point, if ever, do you then say no more feeds if you had them to begin with? Or does it then go into the "cost of doing business" column just like the hosting fees and studio production costs?
You make a really good point... and one of the issues is, once you add a feed, you'll end up pissing off at least some members if/when you later remove it. From our perspective, at the point we drop a feed, we'd want to be able to add a bunch of new content, or a super discount to a new site, or something to replace the perceived value lost from dropping the feed.
But for a new webmaster, I could see that it's a lot easier to cough up $200 a month than to put up $5000 to get enough exclusive content to launch a new site. Perhaps one alternative would be to start with some semi-exclusive content, some exclusive content, and some non-exclusive content, then add as much exclusive and semi-exclusive as possible... I've never done the numbers, but it would probably be fairly easy to make that financially viable.
It's not just a matter of being easier Ian, but more feasible on a limited budget. Not everyone has 5-10 grand to drop on the table for exclusive content when first starting out.
I'm looking to see what's the best balance of purchased vs feeds, how the feeds help or hinder in the short and long-term scenario, as well as trying to get a sense of what surfers expect from paysites these days. I have a pretty good idea of what will probably be the ultimate ideal, and that would be a few feeds that provide niche relevant content, along with on site content that is exclusive and semi exclusive, with regular updates. Which means a pretty intense production schedule, and a crew to handle it.
I'm also seeing more and more gay programs offering multiple sites with one pass on the gay side - which was a pretty common thing to offer on the str8side. But on the flip of that, a lot of the str8 programs have one common content pool and multiple doorway tours. Bottom line, it didn't matter which site you joined, you saw it all anyways. On the gay side, that isn't necessarily the case. With say five sites, all different, no cross-sharing of the picture pool ... and giving it all out at one membership fee ... what's the bonus? Longer retention?
LOL Perhaps I should save that for another thread.
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