I’m wondering, with inflation soaring and the costs of creating content rising like crazy, do you think an industry wide price adjustment is in order for premium content websites? Just speaking as someone who produces a lot of content, our costs have doubled since before the pandemic. In order to attract top talent, we have had to pay more than twice as much as we used to for the same (or similar) models. With new sites we’ve added to our affiliate program, we’ve tested pricing them at $5 higher than we used to ($29.95 instead of $24.95) and it did not hurt new sign-ups at all. While we are going to be testing raising prices on new sign-ups on some of our older sites, I’m wondering if anyone has ever tried testing raising pricing on recurring members? If so, did it result in a lot of cancellations or did people not really notice or mind? Or do you think raising prices on recurring members just a big no-no?
I have actually been wondering about that, inflation is really started to hit and wondered how that will affect porn. Prices must surely go up, sure some inflation can be absorbed but it eats into profits. After all still making the same but everything else costs more.
Exactly. I don’t think there is any “one size fits all” but for premium brands especially I think it’s worth testing. We’ve already slowly raised the prices on a couple of our sites so will be interesting to see how that pans out.
Hmm i guess the question really is - can you do it with recurring billing? I’m assuming billers would have a hard time with something like that, not without ample notice/emails to let the customer know, and that will possibly cost you members as people who forgot they’re paying get reminded.
For new memberships - totally worth testing.
Natalie, yes, that is what I was wondering as well. It seems a bit more tricky with recurring members. I was curious if anyone has ever tried raising prices on Recurring members and if so whether or not they lost members? I guess if you lost a small amount of members it could be justified if enough people kept their memberships to make up the difference.
So I am in no way an expert on the topic, maybe we can get some billing companies to chime in. But the way I understand recurring billing - it is basically a very tiny contract that you sign - person pays you and you provide a service. Altering the amounts paid would then be much more than changing a number in the admin panel - they might have legal grounds for actual pushback (not that anyone will do that on such small amounts, they’ll just cancel). In some countries rules restricting something like that are harsher than in others. For the same reason, service providers who change pricing structure often have “outdated” plans that are basically remnants of old pricing they no longer offer, but are forced to keep offering at the rate promised with all the same services included because that was once sold on a recurring basis.
Wish I could say the same. My sales and income have been decimated this year… whether it’s due to inflation, covid, google changes or something entirely different, I have no idea.
We increased our yearly prices a few months ago and so far all good with the same number of yearly joins. Likely to experiment with the $34.95 price point on BoyFun soon.
That’s great to hear, I definitely think we need to look at increasing our yearly joins price as well.