Having heard people talk about their success with AEBN I figured I’d give it a shot. I set up a theater, branded it as closely as I could to my site, and then gave it prominent placement as one of the main tabs on my site. I even put a blog post up explaining the new tab and the advantages of VOD over pay sites (no surprises on your credit card from rebills, etc.)
It’s been the better part of a week since all that went into place, and my earnings are a whopping $7.16 - and that includes what I earned before I did all the branding and gave prominent placement to the theater (I had a few discrete links that people found).
$7.16 is just sad. If I had put the same level of promotion into a pay site I would have earned a lot more…
So I’m wondering about the whole VOD/PPV model from the perspective of an affiliate… I’ve had PPV links on my site for a while (to sites run by PPV Networks), and they’ve never been big sellers.
I realize with pay sites there’s immediate income even for the ones that do revenue sharing. Am I just not waiting long enough? Is VOD just a slow starter?
Or is the problem that VOD favors the producer, not the affiliate when it comes to revenue?
Last time I did the math…It worked out to 1.76 cents per minute viewed, for me at least.
Then I saw a post here from that guy that has the blast report…and he seemed like he did pretty well as an AEBN affiliate… I kinda feel like AEBN VOD favors the affiliate rather than the producers especially when you consider that all they do is encode your DVD, sell if for 10 cents per minute, and pay less than 2 cents per minute.
VOD can really work out very well for you as an affiliate, but it takes time.
Conversions might not be great to start with. But over time as you send new members, and old members also come back you will see the montly income build up.
However, in the end it all comes down to numbers, the more traffic the more possible revenue. Each sale on a VOD will be small in earnings for you compared to what you might get from a normal membership site, but the idea is that that member will come back many times and spend much more over a longer period (which they will do, they have maybe some credit left, already got a logine etc)
It does however depend on how or what you promote. Whitelabel sites are the best since you know the members will come back to your affiliate site and spend more on your affiliate account.
I’ve promoted VOD for several years now through http://www.gaydemon.tv which has become a big earner - bigger than any other single advertiser on gaydemon by far.
As a producer, we use VOD to monetize our older content. We see that it is almost like a mini-micro-niche in that it pays in recurring visits (not unlike rebills) rather than by big sales numbers initially.
my experience is that it depends on the niche. i send hits to 2 ppv niches the most - solo j/o and catfighting. the catfighting has more signups, but it doesn’t generate much income. i do MUCH better with paysites with catfighting. j/o has less signups, but those signups actually watch videos.
catfighting - $3.37 per member
jackoff - $50.16 per member
on the other hand, it took a while - months or maybe a year - for those members to get to that average of $50.16 each.
I have a Sureflix BYOC on Gay Porn Pig and it hasn’t detracted from my paysite sales. And I really think they’re two different markets or types of surfers. Some surfers like the paysite experience, others like the variety of thousands of movies.
And like Bjorn says, it takes a while to build up a base of members in your BYOC. In my experience just putting up a “Watch Movies” on your button bar doesn’t get you a whole lot of members. You need to use some of the other tools, put up screen grabs and descriptions (like Bjorn does in his LL) or like I do here: http://www.gay-porn-pig.com/naked-men/amateur-guys.html (right side on the sidebar).
Even putting up box covers of new releases will help.
VOD is not a passive program. You really need to promote them a lot harder than just putting up a simple link. If you can blog about new releases or movies in your niche, you’ll be a lot further ahead.
And remember you’re only making a couple of bucks every time a surfer buys time. Where you really make your money is when they keep coming back to your theatre, that’s the “free” money.
Also, in times hard economic times, a surfer might be willing to spend $9.95 to fill up their VOD wallet as opposed to $24.95 to buy a paysite membership. So it’s really about offering as many different options and maximizing your profits.
Additionally, if I as a surfer join “BigDicksAndAndironAssholes” for $29.95 and then don’t like the first vid I see, I will just select another one. At “Bobby’sFireplaceFuckersVOD” I will just keep spending those tokens till I get my log off. Since I will most likely leave some change in the account, I will be back for my forestry fun.
Sorry, I have been spending too much time over at LuridDiggs.
Perhaps the mistake you made was that you were only promoting your own movies on AEBN. Use VOD as an opportunity to promote movies from OTHER producers that would be of interest to your visitors. Money is money, whether they’re buying your movies or someone else’s.
The one other thing you have to consider with VOD and AEBN specifically is your particular traffic.
AEBN (as most or all of the others, I think) has a “lifetime ownership” of the customer plan. If you refer the customer to the theater, but s/he already has an AEBN login and password, whomever originally referred that member will get paid for that traffic, not you.
Sometimes you can entice the surfer to sign up with a new login by arranging a deal with AEBN to give them free time or something, but otherwise, you can definitely lose some sales.
On the other hand, that policy can work to your advantage over time. We have customers for one of our VOD programs that we referred 3 years ago that we’re still getting paid on.
Ok, if you compare it that way to a normal paysite my stats for Gaydemon.TV is something like this (current month, Aug):
Sales ratio: 1 in 84 (Unique hits)
$ per click raw: $0.04
$ per click unique: $0.06
So it definitly does well compared to paysites. Some sites can do much better, but if the stats above had been a paysite I would have been happy with those.