Re: Estimate of member numbers for website
Here at TwinkPay we are switching over to a new CMS called MediaCore. It looks beautiful but my developer has worked for weeks on setting it all up and making it work. Now he is integrating it with Strongbox…another headache!
Something that has not been mentioned yet, you absolutely need good hacker protection for your member areas.
Re: Estimate of member numbers for website
[QUOTE=asiaboy;89285]Here at TwinkPay we are switching over to a new CMS called MediaCore. It looks beautiful but my developer has worked for weeks on setting it all up and making it work. Now he is integrating it with Strongbox…another headache!
Something that has not been mentioned yet, you absolutely need good hacker protection for your member areas.[/QUOTE]
Thank you for this info.
I’m actually now thinking it might be best just to code the site without a CMS.
After all the structure is simple.
With a porn site I am not selling products as with a commercial site where there needs to be a “basket” and a checkout etc. All I am doing is giving members access, so I am thinking, why use a CMS at all?
I will create a members subdomain and put all the stuff that is paid for in there.
I’ve just googled Strongbox and I’m going to read all about it.
That is a very useful thing to know about, thank you!
Re: Estimate of member numbers for website
Welcome Andrew! I am also an affiliate who runs some blogs but I too have been thinking about starting a pay site. I think I asked the same question you did either here or on another board awhile ago and what I learned is that most paysite owners will not divulge their membership figures, not even giving vague ranges to newbies like us.
A few of the folks in this thread have hinted at some numbers but as you noticed, no one has given a hard figure. I can’t blame anyone for this: when my site is up and running I doubt I’d post on a public forum what my membership numbers are. I don’t think I’d want the competition to know how good or bad I’m doing. But one thing I have noticed from looking into this topic is that the top gay porn sites do indeed appear to make a shitload of money. Case in point is Corbin Fisher: from their constant stream of press releases and legal actions you just know that they must be raking in the dough. And I rarely see them advertise and they don’t have an active affiliate recruitment program.
It would be great if a current pay site owner would give actual subscription stats but don’t hold your breath waiting for it… from my scouring forums like this over the years for that info I’ve discovered you would have more luck finding the secret recipe to Coke.
Another “taboo” question you may want to ask is how to find models… most porn producers guard their secret for finding hot guys as much as they do membership figures. Fortunately many of the GayDemon members have been much more forthcoming on this topic and there are several threads here that give great info about finding models.
For additional startup info I recommend the forums at Netpond. Good luck on your site and let us know when its up and running with an affiliate program we can join!
And finally, for inspiration you might want to rent the movie “Middle Men”, which is about the early days of internet porn. One scene in the movie is classic: the two guys that supposedly created the first porn site hooked up a buzzer that would go off every time they made a sale. It didn’t take long before it was buzzing almost non-stop, 24 hours a day. I imagine its not like that today but you never know!
Re: Estimate of member numbers for website
[QUOTE=msm;89471]Welcome Andrew! I am also an affiliate who runs some blogs but I too have been thinking about starting a pay site. I think I asked the same question you did either here or on another board awhile ago and what I learned is that most paysite owners will not divulge their membership figures, not even giving vague ranges to newbies like us.
[/QUOTE]
Thank you msm for this and your other comments.
I can understand why people do not wish to divulge the figures for membership. However I’ve gleaned enough from what I’ve read to get a bit of an estimate.
I have run small businesses in the past and I greatly enjoy doing it. The difference with the Internet from “real life” is that in real life you can often assess the business someone else in the field is doing. You can count the number of customers a shop is getting over a period of time for example. However with the Internet there is no way of knowing how well a particular business is doing.
Fortunately because of other activities of mine not related to this website I’m creating I do have access to a number of potential models for the site, and it was this which gave me the idea to do it.
I’m lucky in that I have good website building skills, I’m experienced in filming and so I will be doing the whole thing myself.
My main area for research now is getting the site promoted on the web. I think that the affiliate schemes are the best way ahead. Even with an affiliate scheme I am of course better off the more people I have that come directly to the site rather than from a link on an affiliate, so getting the site noticed in as many different forums etc. as possible and also listed on directories will be beneficial.
Re: Estimate of member numbers for website
Don’t we all love secrets? whistle
In an ideal world it would be nice to know how many members some sites have, or how many in the year actually rebill, and for how long, but really, it isn’t an ideal world. We are, after all, in a competition. All of us are chasing that elusive dollar, and many hold their strategies close to one’s self, to avoid giving our competition an inside edge.
As an affiliate, I’d love to know the number of members within a site, helps in promotion of it, or in deciding whether to even promote it. Course, be super great to know the real rebilling stats, to determine if PPS or REV is the way to go. But it just isn’t gonna happen, so like SEO we make an educated guess, cross our fingers, hope we are right and go on.
After all, it is a business, isn’t it? lol
Re: Estimate of member numbers for website
Well, I’ll throw in some of my experience here.
The porn business is now a very tough one. When I started 6 years ago I had my first sale within 20 minutes of setting the site live… but even so it took a further 14 months and over £100,000 to get it to break even point.
60 sales a month really won’t cover your costs - not even your model fees. If you update once a week your rebills will be very poor. You’ve got to earn a living out of this - if you consider your time as free how on earth are you going to put food on the table?
But, if you get it right - and that’s a very tricky and finely balanced thing to do - then you can make plenty of money, but that also depends on the world economy. Traffic converts less well than it did 2 years agao - every affiliate here will confirm that.
As to the BIG question, well, I’ll go out on a limb and tell you that before the world went in to recession my site was selling close to 4,000 memberships a month. There you go… an answer!
Re: Estimate of member numbers for website
Not only recession, the other big problem is piracy. No one has warned you yet but you’re gonna suffer a big headache the first time you find that someone has merrily posted your videos in a forum -or many forums- and that literally thousands are enjoying your work for free, and thanking the guy who posted instead of thanking you for producing them.
At my site we fight piracy very seriously. The problem is that many webmasters don’t, so a surfer may be won’t find my content on the web, but will find some other more or less similar and once he jacked off and came … the sale is lost !!!
Re: Estimate of member numbers for website
Bravo to Adam for giving an actual answer to the question about sales!!! I think that’s the first time I’ve seen a paysite owner do this in the 4 years I’ve been reading adult forums. Thanks!
Re: Estimate of member numbers for website
Recession and Piracy go hand-in-hand. Back in the boom years I had many people email me to say that they found my films on a torrent site and then they joined to see more. And they rebilled or joined time and time again. Those people are not members anymore because they don’t value the cost of porn when they can find it for free and they are skint. I know because they’ve told me so.