I'm talking about good, as well. It's why I said "doing well" and "doing extremely well" as opposed to saying anything about average.

It's no secret that first transaction to second transaction retention isn't going to be a massive number. If someone's retaining FT to ST at an extremely high number I'd be concerned they're not making it easy enough for their members to cancel.

No matter how great your navigation is, how great the content is, how often it's updated, so on so forth, there's just plain and simple a big chunk of new joins who have no intention whatsoever of rebilling and there's nothing you can do to get them to rebill. So even all those great retention tools, offerings and elements still only subject a minority of new joins to being influenced to rebill.

Further, it's important to not let your perception of rebills be distorted by multiple (2+) transaction members. Which is to say, if you look at your stats and have 1000 signups and 800 rebills... you do not necessarily have an 80% retention rate. What if, of those 800 rebills, there are 20 members who've each remained members for 5 months each? You're down below 70% eligible FT to ST retention, now. And of the remaining, what if 10 of those members have been your member for over a year? Now you're down to well below 60% eligible for FT - ST retention. But you're still doing pretty damn good to have 1000/800 joins /rebills.

What else is there worth considering? What about the quality of traffic you're being sent? If you're getting low volumes of high quality traffic - for instance you have a very particular niche site and you're getting trickles of traffic from other sites within that particular niche - then you'll get low volumes of signups but improve your chances of conversion to rebill.

If you're a very popular site promoted by tons of different people, you'll get a crapload more initial signups but because of the variety of traffic you're receiving, you could see significantly lower retention rates but still be doing extremely well for both you and your affiliates.

Which is why I say that lower numbers can still suggest someone's doing extremely well, and using someone's best examples doesn't paint a fair picture.