Damn, you're funny, KK. That was good.

Alex, precisely. The BOX is the problem..they all have a lot of money to do fancy designs that slyly insinuate that there's more in there than there is.

I'm currently in the midst of a redesign, finally with a major designer, my first tour I did myself, the second one (what a disaster!) was supposed to be a more professional version of design elements that I made..

Anyway, I'm planning to have two pro tours now and we'll see if they do better or worse than my original (thanks to my ex I no longer have my psds of my first tour, grrr.)

I try to be as precise as possible in my tour language, stating definitive numbers in the hope that surfers will somehow or other notice the difference, but I'm sure that there are few that do.

Slightly off topic, but I'd like to know how others have been doing with those 30 minute free tours...I think that with my site, seeing the members area would clinch the sale. Not requiring a credit card would help. I'm flailing around looking for sales tools that will work. For a site that has a shitty members' area, the strategy must be different, for mine, I want them in there so that they can be convinced.

Anybody currently running non-credit card 15 to 30 minute free trials? If so, please let me know what results you've seen.

Gawd will wonders ever cease, talk about beating a dead horse! LOL It's DEAD. :matey:

This milseading surfers sending them all to the same members area is the biggest crock of shit I've ever heard.

ARS has how many sites? do you think they have that many members areas? Python has how many sites? And for each site they have a totally different members area right?

Pu-leeze. This debate is futile, I'm going to the auto show.

Yes we all -- in a sense -- buy from the same content providers and same plugin companies, does not mean:

a) every large paysite has to be constructed in the way I described to 90 others

b ) every paysite has to be connected at all to every other paysite in that sponsor's stable

c) that (guessing these numbers out of a hat) with three dozen plugin companies and 400 plugin products everyone has to use the same five only and the same 100 only (which tends to be the case)

d) that paysite owners can't shoot their own exclusive content

e) that every members area has to be in the same cookie mold every where you go

I could go on, but what you got by "my reckoning" you reckoned wrongly. If this is the ONLY model for a members area, then yeah maybe we should give up because surfers are already tired of it.

A small niched site deliverying, oh 15K of pics of only that niche, and which displays care to be different or the best in that one area and displays (a certain feature lacking in most cases:) creativity is going to have greater retention than the 2 million image site with 4k niched content interconnecting to 90 clones.

Yes.

Also explains why if you sell a surfer a membership site to XYZCash, you'll never again sell that surfer to another XYZCash site because they've seen all of 100 XYZ's sites already having joined one of them.

I like horse-beating especially when they are dead. It's a new niche. Wow, this could be site number 101. Anyone got 10 pics so I can throw up a new paysite? :P

I'm not sure you even need 15k of pics. Our amateur site is up to 5k of pics now and our retention rate is a tad better than the industry average.

As Heather mentioned earlier - we get quite a few guys come back to the site and sign-up again too.

I don't see how ANY free trial is a no credit card trial. That makes zero sense.

A surfer on a free trial has to be able to pre-auth for the amount of the rebill at the time of the free trial or he doesn't get to join.

Now if you are doing a 30 minute free trial moving to a one day or three day or seven day paid trial of 5 bucks, then you're only pre-authing the next trial price, NOT the monthly rebill.

But you don't just let surfers in because you think they might have a valid credit card with money to spend on it.

Damn, you're funny, KK. That was good.[/b][/quote]
Well it just seemed to be the crux of the matter given the start of the thread. Though now we're off on another tangent ;)

So we have to be nice (Spit!) to the surfer now,huh?

Its the end of the world as we know it ;)

bandwidth leeching freeloaders you mean Nick?