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| Porn Users Forum » Question re recurring memberships |
| 1-17 of 17 Posts | Page 1 |
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| 01-03-15 06:23am - 3641 days | Original Post - #1 | |
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rearadmiral (0)
Active User Posts: 1,453 Registered: Jul 16, '07 Location: NB/Canada |
Question re recurring memberships This may be more of a poll question, but since I’m looking for details and discussions I figured this was the better way to go. Do you have any recurring memberships? I read on another forum where my kind of porn buying marks me as a leech in that I join a site every few months to download the latest updates. I have about a dozen sites I go back to regularly and use this model. The one recurring membership I have is to a relatively new (and expensive) site, Assylum.com. At the monthly subscription fee each update costs me about $12 CAD, which is a bit pricey. The only reason I don’t follow my usual pattern here is because when I went to cancel my membership they made me an offer for a much lower monthly fee. It made sense for me. At half price it’s still expensive for me but I don’t mind supporting small niche sites. That got me wondering though. Do you have any thoughts on why more sites don’t offer discounts for recurring members? My favorite porn site is Amateur Allure, which has a monthly fee of about $40 CAD, which is about $10 per scene per month. That’s a bit too pricey for me so I join every second month which brings the cost per scene down to $5. Admittedly that’s still expensive when compared to large sites but I like what AA has to offer and I’m willing to pay that. The other oddity is the very common practice that sites have of offering a discount through TBP/PU for the first month and then the regular price for any recurring months. Apart from capturing the poor sap who forgets to cancel, why would anyone stay to get access to a much smaller volume of porn for more money? Does anyone have any thoughts on this? It seems to me that if a site like Amateur Allure offered a discount for recurring months (and I’m only using them as an example, I’m not picking on them) that would be safer for them. If they have other members like me they run the risk that I won’t come back, or I’ll come back annually and really drive the cost per scene down. | |
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| 01-03-15 09:16am - 3641 days | #2 | |
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pat362 (0)
Active User  Posts: 3,575 Registered: Jan 23, '07 Location: canada |
The only recurring membership I currently have is for classic porn. It's recurs at the same join price and I haven enjoyed enough of the updates to make it worth while to stick around. I also have some long term non-recurring memberships to Brazzer and Blacks on Blondes but that is a different thing since I got those because the offer was too good to pass up. Long live the Brown Coats. | |
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| 01-03-15 10:03am - 3641 days | #3 | |
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Drooler (0)
Disabled User  Posts: 1,831 Registered: Mar 11, '07 Location: USA |
As far as being a leech is concerned, you can either do as you have been doing, or you can let the site be the leech and pay every month for what you can get for less by waiting a while. There's a hidden dimension to pricing on some sites as they do offer discounts for people who stay past the first month. Some sites I've joined through ccbill or epoch have made such offers. I've encountered them close to the end of the first month. However, it's best to be careful and check the current month's billing at the billing site to make sure the discount remains in effect. I've had success with GoddessNudes and ALS Angels with long-lasting monthly discounts. I don't know if those are still on offer, though. My preference is for 1-year subscriptions that have a low effective monthly rate, so long as I really believe in the site. I wanted something new, so I left England for New England. | |
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| 01-04-15 04:06am - 3640 days | #4 | |
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jook (0)
Active User  Posts: 325 Registered: Dec 22, '13 Location: jersey city |
Recurring payments, fees, etc., are a pet peeve. Unless you are getting a benefit from doing so, the only one benefitting is the seller. The selling point is "convenience" to the consumer. What baloney. How inconvenient is it to click a button, or god forbid, write a check? This applies to everything, i.e., magazines, utilities, amazon prime (which I just opted out of), etc. I prefer having a choice, and that was my rationale with amazon prime... they weren't offering any benefit for automatically renewing and I know very well they will let me know when my subscription is expiring. As it relates to porn, I have never had a recurring membership and I can't think of an instance where that'll ever happen. Even with a discount, the cost/benefit does not exist, at least for me. After the first month I've generally downloaded all I want. No site I know of offers enough new material each month to warrant even a discounted price. RA already did the math. I've gone back to a couple of sights after 6 months or so to get new material, but that's as far as I'll go. The very first thing I do when I join a porn site is to cancel my membership so I don't forget to later on. Edited on Jan 04, 2015, 04:12am | |
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| 01-04-15 09:46am - 3640 days | #5 | |
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Ed2009 (0)
Suspended Webmaster  Posts: 509 Registered: Sep 12, '09 Location: Wales, UK |
The key advantage for websites of recurring memberships is regular income. If all members just buy single-month memberships 2-4 times per year, income fluctuates wildly, budgeting becomes extremely difficult (as does paying staff etc.) and sites tend to go bust. The business model for recurring memberships (even with a very small monthly fee) is just much safer and more stable. The alternative is unreliable, causes accounting problems and (in the UK at least) can cause a headache with tax as we end up paying tax on income we may or may not get and then have to claim it back months later. This is another reason why paysites are so keen to pile on other benefits (beyond the downloadable content) which cannot be just ripped and stored, to encourage stable income. Webmaster of StripGameCentral and A Measure of Curiosity. | |
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| 01-05-15 02:06am - 3639 days | #6 | |
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jook (0)
Active User Posts: 325 Registered: Dec 22, '13 Location: jersey city |
Let me preface what I have to say that it is not directed at you personally but at the industry. Frankly, I am not sympathetic to paysites that are not able to attract recurring memberships. It's not as if you're a charity and I'm gonna spend money just to keep you guys in business. You'd have to make it worthwhile. You say that paysites pile on other benefits. Can you elaborate? I don't recall coming across any website that provided any benefit other than a negligible smaller charge for recurring with the exception of the ones mentioned above by RA. Even those sites don't fit my cost/benefit model. I took a quick look at your site, stripgamecentral. A 30 day membership is about $15 and change (converted) while recurring is about $12 and change. Assuming you add 1 video a day, something most sites don't do, the cost would be about 40 cents for each video. While that's seemingly cheap, it's still about twice the cost, at least for me -- my comparison is for a site that costs $40 for a month and I download 200 videos, which is about my norm. Another downside is variety. It seems most websites offer the same old same old, i.e., the scenes are all the same or similar scenarios as is most everything else. People grow weary of that. Sorry to be a contrarian and there's nothing more that I'd like but to find a site I like and retain my membership indefinitely rather than constantly going through the hassle of finding new sites. But there needs to be radical change. | |
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| 01-05-15 05:58am - 3639 days | #7 | |
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biker (0)
Active User  Posts: 632 Registered: May 03, '08 Location: milwaukee, wi |
It is not worth it to me to subscribe for more then a month. I can easily download a years worth of updates in that time, even if the site adds a new scene every day. Most often the majority of scenes are not to my taste, so I typically only download a 5th of any new material. So getting a new month long subscription once a year will allow me to download all the new material I want. There is no need to subscribe any more then that. Warning Will Robinson | |
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| 01-05-15 06:26pm - 3638 days | #8 | |||
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pat362 (0)
Active User Posts: 3,575 Registered: Jan 23, '07 Location: canada |
You don't have to be sympathetic but did you ever think that one of the reasons why sites aren't able to retain recurring memberships has absolutely nothing to do with the type of the porn they produce. How many past members go look for that sites stuff on tube and torrent sites once their membership is done? I don't know the number but it has to be huge when you consider the popularity of all those so called free porn sites. Maybe it's a generational thing. I mean I'm from the era where you saw maybe a dozen movies come out per month (if that many) and who couldn't afford to buy even one of them because they were each about 100$. Even buying a dvd today is about 20$ and you get 4-5 scenes unless it's a compilation. One site may cost you 20$ but you will get as few as 4 scenes to as many as 30 unless it's a site like Videobox. easily get a dozen or more
They aren't but they need money to make porn. Now I'm not suggesting that you join a site whose work you don't like but maybe you could invest a little of your hard earned cash in a site whose stuff you like even if they only have 4 or 5 good scenes. I know 5$ for one scene seems high but ask yourself how much money you spent eating in a fast food restaurant for a meal that was mediocre and you won't ever be able to eat that meal again while a good scene is still good 5 years from now.
I think you have an unrealistic idea of what it costs to produce porn. Producing porn is expensive. one single b/g scene cost a producer about 3000$ so if a site updates with just one scene per week than it's a monthly cost of 12,000$. That's just the cost of producing it. porn providers have to them pay CC processing fees, Server fees, rental fees, affiliate programs fees. Studios could easily afford this 5 years ago because the ratio of paying customers to low life freeloaders was still skewed toward the black but that slowly changed in the last 5 years and today the low life outweigh the paying customers by a wide margin. You want to know just how bad I think it now is. Just look at Videobox. Once upon a time this was the go to example for good but inexpensive porn. I guess in many ways it still is but only if you are new to internet porn because their library is gigantic but how many recurring members is VB able to retain now? How many movies are actually worth joining for each month? I looked at their most recent updates and the vast majority of them are at least 5 years old, not exclusive and some of it you probably already own because it's part of a comp movie you downloaded 3 years ago. Long live the Brown Coats. | |||
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| 01-06-15 03:15am - 3638 days | #9 | |
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jook (0)
Active User Posts: 325 Registered: Dec 22, '13 Location: jersey city |
I respect your opinion but disagree with the entire premise. There are constant changes in technology. That applies to virtually every industry. The growing pains of porn are not any different than the recent changes in other industries, i.e., auto industry, movies, music, etc. Change is natural and if mostly left alone, i.e., no government or outside interference, it results in a more efficient product. That is an inherent principle of capitalism, no? Paysites might be hurting now, but in the long run, everyone will be better off... that is, if history is correct. I don't want to get into a long discussion about this, but I'll point out one example. I've been a music fan and collector all my life. Record stores were like a second home to me. When the digital revolution erupted, which over a short period changed the entire face of the industry, I rebelled. It hurt to see my favorite institution dying, the record store. For years, I continued shopping in what were becoming dwindling stores and paying more and inconveniencing myself more. I still go to record stores on occasion, but that's mostly a nostalgic thing now.
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| 01-06-15 06:36pm - 3637 days | #10 | |
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pat362 (0)
Active User Posts: 3,575 Registered: Jan 23, '07 Location: canada |
^If as you say you are a long time fan of music and I truly believe that you are than you must realise that the only reason (bar any other) why there is still a music industry today is because the government got involved. Ever hear of something called Napster? Do you buy movies on physical medias? Have you ever noticed that there is a huge notice at the beginning of each film that tells the owner what would happen if he or she is caught duplicating said film? I wish it was a better world where the majority of people took the time to reflect on their actions and then come to the realisation that what they are about to do is wrong and avoid doing it but the harsh reality is that not enough people do that. Too many people just don't give a shit. The main reason why many people act the way they do is because there are laws preventing them from being complete assholes. The problem for the porn industry is that there are no such laws protecting them and to make matters worse. Many of the assholes fucking the industry are in it already so good luck trying to fix a problem with one of the biggest culprit is in bed with you. Maybe one day a piece of technology will come out that will fix many of the current issues facing the porn industry but you can be assured that whatever technology it is. It's not going to be one where it's in any going to make porn viewing any better. It's more likely going to be some kind of DRM type encoding system that allows users to view the content on his computer but can't be uploaded, copied and whatever else people do to steal porn. I've been watching porn for nearly 30 years and I have seen what technology has done for the industry. The golden age for porn was in the 80's when porn moved from the few adult theaters across the world and into the houses of every person rich enough to own a VCR. The number of porn customers increased as the price of VCR decreased to the point where many people got a VCR simply so they could finally watch porn at home. The VCR killed adult theaters but no one cried(other than theater owners) because the needs of both the producers and customers were being met with the VCR. That sort of changed over time because you started to see something the porn producers had never seen. Content thieves. No one in the 70's or 80's was going to steal a 35mm porn movie and make copies of it. The cost wouldn't have been worth it but the same thing couldn't be said for copying a VHS tape. The porn producers weren't happy with that development but since copying a tape wasn't as easy as it sounds and frankly it was mostly a few individuals taping a movie for their friends then producers were still making huge profits. I think porn producers saw about the same kind of profits from the mid-80's until late 90 not because there weren't more thieves each year but because you always had an increasing amount of people paying for it. The internet did the porn industry what the VCR did to adult theaters. It slowly but surely killed it. I know you will say that there is more porn done in a month now than there was in a year in the 80's and that is all true but too many people don't pay for porn now and unless the government gets involved then the industry is truly(pardon the pun) fucked. Long live the Brown Coats. | |
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| 01-07-15 11:50am - 3637 days | #11 | |
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jook (0)
Active User Posts: 325 Registered: Dec 22, '13 Location: jersey city |
I don't think we're ever gonna agree on this cuz it seems we are coming from different political camps. Of course I know about napster and all the napsters of the world. And believe it or not, they still exist except in much smaller numbers and aren't so obvious about it. What.cd has virtually any movie or song you ever wanted. So, why buy from amazon when you can get it for nothing at what.cd? I like to think that most people wanna do the right thing. Frankiy, napster and all its cousins would have been out of business in no time if the record companies weren't so resistant to change. If they embraced the new technology instead of trying to throw people in jail, everyone would have been a lot better off... except for napster. I don't think we see less pirating because of the laws that were passed. On the contrary, the pirating went on even after strict laws were passed. Things only changed when the record companies woke up and decided to make downloads available through legal sites like amazon and iTunes. I'm not a libertarian by any means, but I do think enacting laws to cure every ill in society is not the answer. | |
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| 01-07-15 06:20pm - 3636 days | #12 | |
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pat362 (0)
Active User Posts: 3,575 Registered: Jan 23, '07 Location: canada |
^I concur. We will never agree on this particular subject but at least we had a nice discussion. Long live the Brown Coats. | |
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| 01-08-15 02:54am - 3636 days | #13 | |
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jook (0)
Active User Posts: 325 Registered: Dec 22, '13 Location: jersey city |
Likewise, though I am obviously right and you're wrong. Just joking -). | |
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| 01-08-15 05:02am - 3636 days | #14 | |
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Ed2009 (0)
Suspended Webmaster Posts: 509 Registered: Sep 12, '09 Location: Wales, UK |
One thing I've never understood, is when I offer recurring memberships at $3.99 or $4.99, no-one goes for them. When I offer them above $10 I get a 25% retention rate. Webmaster of StripGameCentral and A Measure of Curiosity. | |
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| 01-09-15 04:01pm - 3635 days | #15 | |
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LPee23 (0)
Active User  Posts: 399 Registered: Jul 14, '13 Location: USA |
Markets are not entirely rational. Sometimes, customers perceive higher quality in higher priced products. Also, if you work with affiliates, they may make a better pitch for a higher priced site, resulting in higher retention. Hey, if they stay longer for $10, which is totally a reasonable price, then roll with it! Better to be pissed on, than to be pissed off. | |
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| 01-10-15 09:21am - 3634 days | #16 | |
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pat362 (0)
Active User Posts: 3,575 Registered: Jan 23, '07 Location: canada |
^I actually think markets are rational when it comes to pricing. Unless you already know what you are getting for your money then of course you will assume that something at 10$ is better than something at 5$. The only time where pricing is subjective is when we start to talk about brand names. I don't personally believe that a 200$ pair of Adidas running shoes are significantly better than a 60$ pair of a lesser known brand. The cost you pay for a well known brand is often to cover the gigantic amounts of money they pay out in endorsement to athlete and celebrities. Long live the Brown Coats. | |
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| 01-10-15 09:55am - 3634 days | #17 | |
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LPee23 (0)
Active User Posts: 399 Registered: Jul 14, '13 Location: USA |
My wife knows a jeweler who was helping out a friend chose a stone and setting as a gift for his girlfriend. He gave him a great deal, and offered the stone for a cut rate price. It was less than his friend expected to pay, and his friend looked at the stone, and said he was looking for something a bit nicer. He brought him back a week later and showed him the same stone, this time for triple the price. He was wowed by it. Then, the jeweler told him the truth, and sold it to him for the original price. This is what I mean when I say that people are not always rational when it comes to pricing. It is actually wrong to think that price always correlates with value. Sometimes, people just expect to pay a certain amount as part of the "buying experience"  , especially in areas like jewelry, clothing, etc but also digital content. Better to be pissed on, than to be pissed off. | |
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