Money from Mini-Sites?

[Porngoblin]

I have been kicking around an idea with some WM friends for a while now and we are all agreed that it should work.

Basically it should be possible to make good money with mini-sites - like 1-200 pics and some vids - with sponsor advertising inside if the surfer wants more - and a very low fee like $1 for 24 hours to get in. Kind of like a paid preview site with some unique content, or not. The hassle is with micropayments/billing.

If somebody were to operate a secure token system so that punters could buy books of 5 or 10 tokens and exchange them for site entry via cut and paste from email then this would make the mini-site boom possible. Especially if this somebody were to supply a complete turnkey script for access control and token acceptance. By the time Token Sellers have taken their cut and the card company have theirs then the website operator would be looking at something like $60c on the dollar.

The plan being that resellers/marketers buy blocks of 50,100,1000 tokens at around 85c a ticket and as well as getting the markup they get 1% of the punters spend for ever.

Of course we have it a bit more worked out than this down to methodology and encryption techniques etc but dont wanna give away the store in a public post.

What do people think about this idea/business model?

[Bill]

Everybody has been waiting for micropayments for the last decade.

They still seem to be a decade away.

Back in the day, there were token systems. They all failed.

And they didn't work besides. A pain in the ass. Too many people sucking money off the top. The surfers hated them.

[Porngoblin]

Thanks Bill so what are the bad things you saw about those systems?

What we were thinking of is a system where we provide a piece of software that sits
in a directory as index.php and handles all the token crap plus securing the files in that directory. The only setup the webmaster would need to do would be to run the php file for the first time and put in his password and username from our token site.

Then he can put a sales/landing page outside the directory with a link (for those with a token or two) to the directory - we pick it up from there. Oh and another link to his own token sales page if he is doing that or to our list of token vendors if not.

As regards the surfers, a dollar is a dollar. If they can get 24 hours access to a small site that has 2-3 hours worth of reasonable quality browsing in it then they will be happy I suspect. Because we know which tokens have been reclaimed and the surfers email we can easily re-issue tokens they lose (and cancel the lost ones) etc.

[InfoGuy]

Why would a surfer spend $1 on your mini-site when they can spend a $1-2 for a trial to any multitude of established paysites with significantly more and better quality content?

[Porngoblin]

Originally Posted by InfoGuy

Why would a surfer spend $1 on your mini-site when they can spend a $1-2 for a trial to any multitude of established paysites with significantly more and better quality content?

Several reasons:

1) Card security (or percieved) why give your ccard details and personal details to any porn site with the percieved rep of the industry for suddenly finding you have recurring $24.99 charges on your card that take 3 months to cancel? (I know thats not what its like now but it was and thats the mud that stuck ).

2) Card bottom end transaction limits. Some cards (certainly prepay cards here in the UK) will not let you spend such a small amount. This is why the $3.99 tours (more than 1 GBP) sometimes do better. Buying a book of tokens for $10 gets you into 10 sites. I think some business cards in the US wont let you spend less than $5 as well.

3) Fear of having "RAYS KINKY SEX EMP.INC." appear on a ccard statement. Thing about the tokens is that they will be demonstrable good for lots of things other than porn. Script downloads, Ebooks .... anyplace where a blogger or site owner thinks he can make a buck.

4) It wont be a porn site. OK we will be dealing with porn sites but we will pull some surfers in who did not come looking for porn.

5)Its new.

Enough reasons?

[NY Jester]

Seems like a AVS/AEN type of system - some even offer free sign ups

[cd34]

Check centipaid.com. They've been handling micropayments for quite some time, have a perl module that can be integrated into the server to handle authentication and token handling via their server.

At one point, they were focused on selling pictures (centipix), but migrated over to micropayments entirely with centipix being their offshoot.

[Porngoblin]

Originally Posted by cd34

Check centipaid.com. They've been handling micropayments for quite some time, have a perl module that can be integrated into the server to handle authentication and token handling via their server..

Yep thats the BIG problem. Nearly all smaller webmasters and bloggers have no access to their server to install the module and dont have an army of techs to help if they did. Once installed its not so easy to maintain either (scuttlebutt on a couple of sites)

I am talking about one PHP script called index.php. The webmaster creates a directory and ftp's it in. He then runs the file for the first time. It asks him 4 simple configuration questions. Job Done.

If he wants to change any of these he simply deletes index.php, throws in a new copy and answers them again. My granny could do it. Hell my 10 yr old son could do it!

You can do this on any site, virtually hosted or whatever that runs PHP. It takes 5 mins - not several days with the help of another companies IT department and an Indian PERL software guru.