How fucking sad is today's webmaster

[NickJ]

Interesting how everyone has his or her own perspective. I have been selling video content to webmasters for over 6 years now, I have had pay sites and I see that there are just not that many newbies and less veterans in the biz today. WHY? The subscription model where a user has to buy a membership, gets rebilled automatically, has to remember to cancel, and all that crap has killed this business.

If you are a newbie and you have the best site you can possibly make and you have to hook up with ccbill, ibill or another one of those things I think you are doomed. Where is it going? Pay per view or pay per download or whatever you call it. But even that pay per view crap is still shitty because you still have to give a lot of personal information and have to "FUND" an account and that usually costs about 20 bucks and then you get ripped off because you usually don't get all the mins you paid for.

The customer of the future is that guy that just wants to pay a little and get a little and leave. There are hundreds of millions of guys that don't want to JOIN a pay site and OWN a stupid membership but just want to view maybe one video for lets say one dollar. Why do you think password sites and stealing is such a success? NOBODY WANTS TO JOIN AND BUY MEMBERSHIPS anymore and anyone that thinks otherwise has his or her head in the sand.

Make the videos easy and inexpensive to get and it won't be worth anyone’s time to steal them. Look at what Google just did with Fox. Now you can watch old re runs of citcoms for just 99cents each. This is the future and until the rest of you come up with a better billiing method I think most pay sites will die All but the biggest are doomed. But AHHH, what about the poor affiliates? How the hell are you going to pay them when a guy buys one video for one dollar and leaves? Better wake up because the affiliate model as we know it is going to be a thing of the past. Affiliates are going to be happy with making less but still making something. All this is inevitable. In about two weeks I will have a new pay site with 400 different videos for 2 dollars each. Affiliates will get one dollar and I will keep the other. We will see how it goes.

[Nickatilynx]

Originally Posted by NickJ

Interesting how everyone has his or her own perspective. I have been selling video content to webmasters for over 6 years now, I have had pay sites and I see that there are just not that many newbies and less veterans in the biz today. WHY? The subscription model where a user has to buy a membership, gets rebilled automatically, has to remember to cancel, and all that crap has killed this business.



If you are a newbie and you have the best site you can possibly make and you have to hook up with ccbill, ibill or another one of those things I think you are doomed. Where is it going? Pay per view or pay per download or whatever you call it. But even that pay per view crap is still shitty because you still have to give a lot of personal information and have to "FUND" an account and that usually costs about 20 bucks and then you get ripped off because you usually don't get all the mins you paid for.



The customer of the future is that guy that just wants to pay a little and get a little and leave. There are hundreds of millions of guys that don't want to JOIN a pay site and OWN a stupid membership but just want to view maybe one video for lets say one dollar. Why do you think password sites and stealing is such a success? NOBODY WANTS TO JOIN AND BUY MEMBERSHIPS anymore and anyone that thinks otherwise has his or her head in the sand.



Make the videos easy and inexpensive to get and it won't be worth anyone’s time to steal them. Look at what Google just did with Fox. Now you can watch old re runs of citcoms for just 99cents each. This is the future and until the rest of you come up with a better billiing method I think most pay sites will die All but the biggest are doomed. But AHHH, what about the poor affiliates? How the hell are you going to pay them when a guy buys one video for one dollar and leaves? Better wake up because the affiliate model as we know it is going to be a thing of the past. Affiliates are going to be happy with making less but still making something. All this is inevitable. In about two weeks I will have a new pay site with 400 different videos for 2 dollars each. Affiliates will get one dollar and I will keep the other. We will see how it goes.

I'll bite....

Whats the size of the vids?

Whats the cost of bandwidth per...

What do you think it will convert TGP crap traffic at?

[NickJ]

Thanks for asking. According to my research, and I started thinking this way before google and Fox got together with the similar idea, and now also Napster too..

The files are wmv format and they are big. The biggest runs at 1.5kb/sec almost full screen so there is no skimpiong on quality. You bring up an excellent point about crap TGP traffic. I have found through trial runs that the reason that people think this traffic is crap is becuast

NO BODY WANTS TO JOIN A SITE AND OWN A MEMBERSHIP AND GET REBILLED OVER AND OVER AND THEN REMEMBER TO CANCEL. It is simple.

But, these people who comprise the "crap" traffic are just dying to get something like I am proposing. I would be happy to open the stats when this thing is operational in 2 weeks. Originally, when I was getting a lot of TGP/MGP traffic from sublime, coversions were so low I thought that maybe the traffic was coming form China. We did some filtering and found that it WAS indeed North AMerican traffic. The traffic is not crap. The way we are asking these guys to pay for our stuff is. Just look at IBill today. They are broke.

[Anthony]

Originally Posted by NickJ

But, these people who comprise the "crap" traffic are just dying to get something like I am proposing. I would be happy to open the stats when this thing is operational in 2 weeks. Originally, when I was getting a lot of TGP/MGP traffic from sublime, coversions were so low I thought that maybe the traffic was coming form China. We did some filtering and found that it WAS indeed North AMerican traffic. The traffic is not crap. The way we are asking these guys to pay for our stuff is. Just look at IBill today. They are broke.

IBIll is broke due to mis management. Not because of subscriptions going down.

[MorganGrayson]

First...welcome to Oprano, NickJ!

Thanks for sharing your business thoughts. I gave you points to get you started toward some Oprano gear!

[NickJ]

Anthony, you might be correct about that but all the billing cos are not makin gwhat they used to and that is a fact.

Oh and about the bandwidth.. this is not really a factor today...if... and this is important...if you have a site that converts....

that is converts at a 2 dollars or whatever. The reason bandwidth is even an issue is becuase of all the surfers that get free free free and don't join..

but if you have them hitting up a 2 dollar charge very often bandwidth will not be an issue and today bandwidth is pretty cheap when you buy it in bulk.



SWEET ! !. thanks for the Oprano Gift points :-) YOu made my day.

[Nickatilynx]

Originally Posted by NickJ

Thanks for asking. According to my research, and I started thinking this way before google and Fox got together with the similar idea, and now also Napster too..

The files are wmv format and they are big. The biggest runs at 1.5kb/sec almost full screen so there is no skimpiong on quality. You bring up an excellent point about crap TGP traffic. I have found through trial runs that the reason that people think this traffic is crap is becuast

NO BODY WANTS TO JOIN A SITE AND OWN A MEMBERSHIP AND GET REBILLED OVER AND OVER AND THEN REMEMBER TO CANCEL. It is simple.

But, these people who comprise the "crap" traffic are just dying to get something like I am proposing. I would be happy to open the stats when this thing is operational in 2 weeks. Originally, when I was getting a lot of TGP/MGP traffic from sublime, coversions were so low I thought that maybe the traffic was coming form China. We did some filtering and found that it WAS indeed North AMerican traffic. The traffic is not crap. The way we are asking these guys to pay for our stuff is. Just look at IBill today. They are broke.

Its an interesting idea....

BUT....

What about processing costs?

Also...

Say I make 35.00 off a sale ,to my own paysites after processing deductions and I send 10,000 hits..that convert at 1 in 500...I make 20 sales = $700.


If yours converts at 10 times better..ie 1 in 50... one makes $400 to ones own paysites.

to stay still you are looking at 1 in 30.......

Now onto recurring...at a flat recurring rate of say 50% that means on average that the join will earn you 17.50 next month...which means the guy you got will have to buy 4 or 5 more videos....

Not gonna happen....

Most likely , At least 50% of the surfers you have don't even have credit cards lol

When the surfer has a hard on whether the downoad is $2 or $ 6 may not matter...

Once you get the surfer ready to put in his credit card extract the maximum dollars from it.

But it will to your bottomline...I'd research the price points...and factor in the member database

[NickJ]

NickaT, Great pionts and I see you are really thinking about this. But, you have to remember I am not going to use a processor such as ccbill. I leared more about this stuff from my research. What I found was that the fact that people get rebilled and the charg back rates are so high this is why they have to charge like 19 percent per transaction. Once again it is this Membership method making the problem.. So if you dump the membership method, and get your own merchant account you will be paying as little as 1.5 % with 15 cents per transaction. This changes everything. And expect charge backs to be very small so you won't have many problems. But, you are going to have to have some cash in the bank to throw around so that the bank will give you your merchant account. Once they find out that you are not selling SUBSCRIPTIONS they are very willing to work with you.