Revshare with Trials
 

LotzaDollars is considering trials again. I personally have never really had any luck with them. They always seem to attrack the surfer that only wants to join for 2 days anyways, rip your content, and leave to only come back in six months and do the same thing again. When you have a member following for a site like Lori's My-Sex-Life.com... Surfers now understand that if you begin to offer a trial they only have to join for a couple of days at a discounted rate, and then come back a couple months later to see the new content, thus avoiding the rebills altogher. We've had this happen to use several times over the years where we would lose membership base because of trials.

Do you think if we offered revshare on trials that we would attrack more affiliates pushing our program? Do we HAVE TO offer PPS on trials to peak affiliates interest? Are affiliates actually expecting a large number of trials converting? Enivitably creating a larger % of the revshare sign up?

We are actually considering setting up second tours for all our paysites where we offer trials so affiliates that would like to offer our sites with trials can use these tours instead. Any opinions are greatly appreciated.

Personally i'm not a big fan of the Revshare trials myself. If the surfer really likes what you're offering he'll buy the $24.95 membership. From my experience the no-trial signups have a much higher retention that the trial ones.

But that's just me.

I think that affiliates always expect to have steady income from revshare.

I think that content quality is major issue, so affiliates will pick revshare programs when they see good and regularly updated content.

I hate trials with revshare. The payout on the trial sale isn't worth the bother, and in my experience only about 1 in 8 convert to full month at end of trial.

Yea...another detractor of trials with rev share here.

There's one particular fairly popular sponsor I've been sending minor amounts of traffic to for quite some time. Out of the few dozen sales...not a single one converted from trial. So, a few dozen sales...and the account still hasn't reached the minimum payout level. Not a sponsor I'll build anything new for to say the least.

I agree with you Fonz! We're currently at $29.95 for all our sites.

I'm not a fan of trials period. They either buy or they don't. It's no longer the 90's...

Pass on the trials if you can. Trials suck.

Mr. Yum...
How do ya think that reacts on our bottom line? Obviously offering trials effects everyone's revenue income any way I look at it. I feel that content is key here and when the consumer comes into a paysite tour, likes the content, and he/she is considering purchasing, I doubt that the price at that point is a real issue. If they're interested, and are ready to pull out their credit card, I don't believe that spending $3.99 on a "tricky" 2 day trial vs $29.95 for 30 days matters. In fact, I believe that the trial pushes them to cancel their membership right away to avoid additional charges.

Other programs don't like to trade exit traffic with us either because we don't offer trials.
I wish the industry would just drop trials...they're a pain!

See now PPS trials a great for the affiliate, but really fucks up the cashflow of a sponser program.

That's a good point. I'm sure many surfers who sign up for cheap trials cancel their membership even before they step one foot into the members area.

General rule of thumb, though not the case across the board, is that a site without trials tend to be better at retaining members than those with trials.

Special Ed, one thing I did notice about some of your paysites is that a few of the tours could use a face-lift. That might be more effective than adding trials. Also, I haven't actually seen the inside of your sites, but from what I read, some of your smaller sites seem to rely a little bit on third party content, which would make adding trials pointless, because it would take an hour or two on cable to download the entire members area, and the more savvy surfers have seen stuff like pluginfeeds already on other paysites, so that won't make them stay. And if the surfer came in looking for fem dom stuff, then other bonus sites unrelated to that niche may not hold their interest.

We are in the process of having new tours done :D

|thumb

Thanks Halfdeck...great points. Like Spookyx said, we are in the midst of adding multiple tours to our current paysites...we would like to catch up on our current promotional tools inventory before we press onto new projects. Although we currently have 3 projects pending...lol. It never seems to stop, and the work just piles up...thanks again for you input :D
So basically I was correct on the way I felt about trials and the way it would reflect our business model

The trial no trial is one of those topics that's impossible for everyone to agree on.

Because of this we coded our script to allow affiliates to turn trials on or off with one click as well as choose their own price points for the trial as well as the monthly fee. (Changing their linking codes is not required) :-) All done in their own admin area with one click for each site.

IMO and personal preference & BVCash default settings; If you run a trial it should be a relatively expensive one. For me I've found that magic number to be $7.95 :-)

I absolutely agree Ed...especially this part "content is key" |thumb

Frankly, I only been in a few paysites over the years that I thought were worth the price of admission. Not surprisingly, if memory serves correctly...I think all of them were monthly joins only. The cookie cutter el cheapo sites almost invariably don't have anything worthwhile inside to keep the surfer recurring. Being the slut I am...I've still promoted those sites, but I think those days are fast coming to a close for me.

I think limited trials are the best.. give the surfer a taste of what they can get, not the whole show at one time

Depends on the niche/site. U sed to make more with a sponsor using trials !!! Almost all of them converted and 50% where recurring. So if you added up all the signups plus convertion and rebills and divided by the number of signups, i was getting more per signups then just full signups

With the introduction of 8mb, 12mb and faster connections becoming the norm a lot of trials will need to be limited access I am sure.

I agree with the no-trials for rev-shares. I like if you decide to have the option of trials, make sure you also offer a no-trial link codes.

Well...even though we have sites like Lori's www.My-Sex-Life.com with over a 1000 videos and 10000 or so digital photos I still do not offer trials. Same with a few others we have in our portfolio. RealTampaSwingers.com and WatchourWives.com have an absolute shitload of content. If the surfer is into swingers, he'll never leave those 2 sites...no kidding, still no trials. PetiteBlondeWife.com, another all exclusive site maintained by an amateur girl that recurs. Still no trial. The information here has been great!

Hmmm? Great idea on the script! So are you saying that you offer the trials, affiliates can pick them if they choose, any price, nice idea...But it still seams like most people here said that they don't prefer "rev-share" on trials. You must be offering PPS on these trials then?

I guess the important question I could ask you then are more affiliates using your trials or not?

Limited trials are great, I agree. That's really the best way to do it man! Paycom/Epoch offers this as an "upsell" from a smaller member's area. You have to create 2 separate member's area's, basically one like an AVS site, and the other is your main updated member's area. I would really like to set that up, but it would be a major overhaul of our member's area. UG! |banghead|

Thanks for the tip Ed...I'll have to give those sites a look see :)

We strictly follow the 3rd party payout revshare model.

The Revshare/PPS argument is another topic no one can agree on which is best. I am a firm believer in revshare and when I promote another program I always choose revshare. I feel it makes more business sense.

I can't give you exact numbers but I can say that my top affiliates all use different strategies. Some with cheap trial and higher monthly rebill some with no trial and a cheaper monthly. Exactly why I wanted our script to allow flexibility like that. My philosophy is you can't make everyone happy all of the time but you can at least try. :D