That is a very intelligent idea. We really should be doing that too. Thanks for the suggestion, as it makes total sense.
You’ve found a balance. BelAmi is not “always on sale” and consumers know that price breaks are what they are and not reliably something they can wait for. You’ve also taken the time to learn who your consumers are and market to them in a unique way.
I subscribe to a meal delivery service. I pay full price every week for a certain number of meals to arrive. What freaking burns my ass about this service is that every 2-3 months I “earn” a coupon to give to someone else to start using the service. So I pay full price, coupons are never applicable to me, but I can give my friends 40% off.
By telling this story, I’m not saying that I think any company should unilaterally drop all their pricing for their existing clients. But managing the optics of your special deals and making sure they are actually special (Christmas only comes once a year) is key.
One of the more clever things that BelAmi’s solution offers is a way to not piss off your loyal, paying members by regularly holding specials.
I think it applies to certain sites which they have seen or realized have sales regularly, regularly enough to wait. Your strategy is better than most I would say.
Like Mary pointed out, Christmas only comes once… sales can be really good tool but not one you can use constantly which is the issue at the moment. I just got another sale offer yesterday from a program… they already had sales not so long ago. At least the way my memory works it feels like they are on constant sale even if there is a short break in-between. I’m sure surfers think exactly the same.
We didn’t have these type of constant sales a couple of years ago, it’s a new “trend”. Somewhat desperate trend which is hurting the overall income for everyone.
I second that, i really did try to push it and it doesnt work.
What a great thread. I think many website owners are between a “rock and a hard place”. Firstly you have to compete with free porn and then you have models signing up for social media sites like just for fans and the charge is less then $9.95 a month and it seems individual models are doing great with being on social media and using this platform to make money and it doesn’t cost the consumer that much.
With this being said, the consumer purchasing gay porn, now have the chance to watch free porn or porn at a very deep discount. Its not that the consumer is being “cheap” a website owner now has to compete with all these platforms to be in the game.
I agree what Mary stated that if you offer your site at $12 per month and its always on sale, then the consumer is not going to pay $24.95 or more a month and just wait for a sale to join. How this effects the site owners, well by giving deep discounts and having sales every week/month, this narrows down the profit and after a while the profitably for the site owner decreases over time. Once this happens, the site owner has to make changes by offering model payouts less, less updates to the members of the site, offer more bonus sites, pay for less production, and control their overhead. Operating a porn site/production studio is a business and we all stay in business when we earn a profit and if we all earn less profit, adjustments have to be made. After a while an owner can only adjust so much so the owner either has to sell, or stop updating or go out of business and we’ve seen this all to often since 2010 and now.
Sites that did make huge amounts of money are now making a lot less, and the studios that made good income now are suffering and hurting for income and doing there best to keep the doors open for business. Its a balance and things have changed since I’ve been in this industry (2001) and I think the studios that are in business today and adapting themselves and changing with times are doing a great job and my hats off to all of us that keep on changing and reinventing themselves to stay alive in this industry regardless if they have to promote and market a continue sale each week or month…its keeping everyone in business and like another stated, its best to get paid something then nothing…a half of something is better then nothing at all.
Dande01, I really like what you’ve written and it got me thinking. Is it better to go “on sale” or set a reasonable price for your content in this current marketplace. I don’t claim to know the answer and I’d bet that it differs from company to company.
Here’s QueerClick’s answer, though, for our own network.
When we launched Sticky, we set our pricing and walked away. It never changes and it never goes on sale. $9.99 for a month, $24.99 for 3, $99.00 for a year. It felt reasonable and we wanted to stay in the traditional US retail price points.
Sticky is only sold via CCBill (with no cascade) and out-earns our affiliate promotions on the same platform every month but a huge margin. When we’ve looked at it for ways to increase sales overall, the one thing we refuse to do is cut the membership price. What we focus on is added value in other ways, but Sticky is quite a different fish to a standard membership site and we have some Buy/Get options at our disposal that others don’t.
Our answer is to add value rather than decrease pricing.