ok, so many of you piped in and told me to get rid of DRM. I couldn’t agree with you all more!
However, my business partner, Rich, who thinks removing DRM will give everything away for free forever is trying to find a way, as usual, to fight me on the decision to remove DRM.
His questions are the following:
I am wondering if we can all make more sales by giving your traffic different purchasing options.
For instance, do you think that it might be an idea to consider offering:
Monthly Membership (as is now)
Pay-Per-Minute (like VOD)
Download To Own (pay like $5 per scene)
What are your thoughts on this?
Now, back to me. I think all the affiliates will shun taking 50% rev share on a $5 scene download. In addition, it will give the consumer the ability to nail us down as Beyonce and Britney Spears got nailed down by i-tunes. For example, if Ms. Spears does not produce a good 7 hits on her new “album” she is losing money. Virgin Megastore (and all DVD retailers) are going out of business because of i-tunes. Ms. Spears or Beyonce rarely sell a full CD at $14.95 retail anymore, they are only selling their strongest hits at $1.29 a pop! I also think education porn consumers on what DRM actually is will make them think twice about choosing a recurring membership.
Am I making any sense?
Who do you defend? Me, Collin or my business partner Rich?
Re: Help! Business partner is fighting removal of DRM
I think Lloyd made a great point. The thieves can and will crack your DRM. You are only pissing off your members who are honest willing to pay. Affiliates will think twice about pushing you, members will not join or cancel and review sites will mark you down.
Re: Help! Business partner is fighting removal of DRM
How about a compromise? Why not keep DRM on your newest stuff? But give away stuff off your oldest DVDs?
I guess you also have to factor in how much you’re making off VOD sales. If you remove DRM, you’ll potentially be shooting yourself in the foot.
DRM might protect your website content, but it doesn’t prevent me from going to my local video store renting your movie (or a Titan or Raging Stallion one) and burn a copy of it. I can give copies to all my friends, and eventually, either me or someone else could upload those videos to the torrent sitesâyour DRM is useless now.
I think a combo isn’t a bad idea because you do want to protect your hard DVD sales on new products and then move them into the VOD market.
Re: Help! Business partner is fighting removal of DRM
[QUOTE=marcjacob;58873]I think Lloyd made a great point. The thieves can and will crack your DRM. You are only pissing off your members who are honest willing to pay. Affiliates will think twice about pushing you, members will not join or cancel and review sites will mark you down.
Get rid of DRM.[/QUOTE]
100% my feeling.
The people you are worried about won’t be stopped by DRM. They will join your site, download your videos and remove the DRM. They would not have come back any way or stayed on as members.
Instead you will be disappointing real paying members, who might have stayed on if you did not use DRM. Do remember, no surfer wants videos with DRM. DRM will always disappoint and be a hindrence to anyone watching your movies.
A couple of other good reasons in my view:
Almost all of the largest and most successful sites around do NOT use DRM. You only need to look at videoboxmen.com, they offer subscribers 1000s of DRM free full DVDs to download and their recurring subscriber base is bigger than any other site I know.
Stats tells me as an affiliate that sites without DRM sell and rebill far better than sites that use DRM. I can honesty say that I see the best stats and ratios on sites without DRM.
But of course I can also see it from a perspective of a producer and owner of these videos. It’s your hard work. But do remember, no matter what you do, people will steal your videos and share them illegally. You can give me any producer with DRM and I’ll give you an example of their videos DRM free and shared illegally.
Re: Help! Business partner is fighting removal of DRM
[QUOTE=gaydemon;58884]In response to this question.
Monthly memberhips - Yes.
PPV - No, VOD is dying and have terrible ratios unless its on a white label
Download to own - No, fail to see the point of promoting single downloads[/QUOTE]
I agree with everything Bjorn said here.
Regarding DRM, theft will always be there and you will never be able to completly prevent it.
You can keep DRM, stay small and have a handful of members who will put up with DRM while your videos are still stolen by those who want them.
Or, you can remove DRM & watch your member base grow month after month.
In no way am I saying that you should be OK with or accept that your videos will be stolen. You should still monitor for this whenever/wherever possible, send DMCA notices, get hosting accounts and processing accounts terminated, file lawsuits, out known thieves, especially those that are among us on the boards, etc.
Are you in this business to make money? If yes, then remove DRM.
Re: Help! Business partner is fighting removal of DRM
Your content is not niche specific enough to make it so attractive to a particular market that they will accept drm out of hand. If you had a superhero site or macrophilia you can do pretty much whatever you want because the fans are desperate for material. In a more general “hot guys having sex” context, unless you can generate your own traffic you are going to have to rely on affiliates to sell your site.
Affiliates, reviewers and criminals hate drm. You probably will have to remove it.
HOWEVER, that does not mean going to a download format. Because of the olden days internet, video had to be served by download. Buying a subscription to a site doesn’t and should not give the member the right to download and own your entire library. Otherwise, what is the point in buying a recurring membership? If you have 500 videos and charge 20 bucks a month, those videos are costing the member 4 cents each. The next month the member (if you update every week) is going to be paying 5 bucks for each video. They can and will cancel and come back a year or so later to harvest all your new stuff. The attitude even amongst the least nefarious is that if it downloads, they own it and can do with it as they like.
Each of our videos has a notice regarding file sharing. We educate our members about it and give them the option to BUY the download if they want to keep it. If they do, sure they have the choice of posting it all over creation, but the more they pay for something, the more they realize that it is not Free.
I don’t buy the argument that there is nothing you can do to stop criminals so don’t even try. James Bond can certainly break into my house but that doesn’t mean I don’t lock my door.
But this all boils down to your philosophy of business and exactly what you are trying to accomplish.
Re: Help! Business partner is fighting removal of DRM
Sorry Colin but overall I support your business partner Rich. There is a reason he is your “business” partnerâ¦
Having as many different purchase options and revenue streams for the same content is always a good idea.
As I stated in your other postingâ¦you need to ask yourself is it worth $29.95 to allow users to download and own all your content forever? If you are comfortable with that scenario then go for it. But, remember once you go down that road you canât ever go back.
Personally, I think you should consider the following:
Monthly memberships with all you can eat streaming plus limited weekly downloads that rotate so that not all your content is available for download at any one time. Make the user stay at least 6 months or a year before they can have access to download your entire library of content. Consider only offering smaller resolution or iPod size downloads instead of full resolution clips. Membership sites are ârentalâ sites in my mindâ¦.you are renting the content for viewing, not selling it outright.
PPM- PPM is going to be harder for a smaller site with a limited amount of content. Users generally are not willing to buy in when there is limited content, they prefer to buy minutes for a wallet from sites like AEBN that have tons of content to chose from. For PPM you should try and partner with as many major PPM sites as possible. But, hold back your new content for at least 3-6 months for your site only before releasing it to other PPM sites. It’s your content and you deserve to get first shot to make the most money from it.
Download to Own: Now here is where I think you can and should remove DRM. If someone is âbuyingâ the file outright, not ârentingâ it, then they should get it without DRM. We are selling DRM free iPhone size DTO on our site and I am pretty happy with the results. With DTO you are âsellingâ the clip to the user, not ârentingâ it to them. Similar to selling them a DVD that they own outright.
You need to decide if you want your membership site to be a ârentalâ or a âsellâ business model.
Re: Help! Business partner is fighting removal of DRM
Alex I’ve seen alot of straight webmasters on GFY going streaming only. That’s one answer but I do wonder how that effects rebils. To me that’s the same as drm. I do totally get that they don’t buy your entire collection for $20 but most would like to download the movie to look at later.
Do you have any stats on what % of members will “snake” the site? One answer to that is only allowing each member a certain amount of bandwidth. That lets legit members download a few movies that they like without allowing one member to download the entire members area and then cancel. To me its about fair use. I do think $20-$30 a month entitles me to download a selection of movies to look at on my hard drive. It doesn’t entitle me to download the entire archive in one month then cancel.
Re: Help! Business partner is fighting removal of DRM
I have to agree with both Marcjacob and Bjorn here.
Sites with DRM protected videos have the worst ratios (for both initial sign-ups as well as for rebills). As an affiliate I rather choose to promote a site that doesn’t use DRM protection over a site that does. I think I am not the only one.
So you might not only miss potential buyers, but potential affiliates as well.
The kind of people that is out there to steal and share your videos are not being stopped by DRM anyway.
Re: Help! Business partner is fighting removal of DRM
Marc, by dramatically increasing the quality of the viewing experience with the changes we have made to the site in the last two months, we have seen joins and rebills go way up. Revenue has increased by 49.7%. Granted we also added Manifest VOD and buy to download (both only using our content) so not all of it is based on our change over to streaming flash. But it is worth noting that many insisted that removing the wmv and mov options would be the kiss of death and it certainly has not been the case.
As for downloading and keeping, we give our members live shows which are included in the membership cost. The value of these shows is far in excess of the monthly membership so they do get their real value for their subscription fee. But that is us. A site that offers videos and photos of a more general nature may have to handle things differently unless they are really stellar with a marketable brand.
If I were starting over from zero again, there is no way I would start a regular hardcore site. I would find a specific niche and be the very best at it. Then give those members a better experience than they get anywhere else. That is what keeps them with us long term and coming back even after they do leave.
We have never allowed downloads (limited or unlimited) for the same reason we would never have hardcore muscle sex on our site. Once you do that, then the public wants it all the time and it not something that we can provide. Plus that market is already being well served (hardcore muscle sex) so we take a different approach which makes us valuable to our members.
We do offer the option for premium members to purchase DRM free downloads which they can play on iPod, iPhone, QuickTime or AppleTv at a price lower than what Standard Members pay.
With regard to content rotation, we tried that and it made folks really upset. They have favorites and since they can really only watch them on the site (unless they have purchased the download) they don’t want to have them removed.
For us, it is about developing options that serve our members AND further our business goals. When we look at how they have used the site in the past and polled them on what they really want, the approach we take is very popular. Our affiliates with muscle traffic know that Manifest is a great and easy sell.