I see a lot of $1 trials still

[Harmonizer]

How are you guys paying PPS on $1 trials still? Hasn't the use of prepaid cards killed the $1 model?

[Milfer]

are you from India?

[Harmonizer]

Originally Posted by Milfer

are you from India?

yup... you got it.

Let me try it this way... program doing 150K monthly sees a a drop in recurring billing by reducing trial joins from above $5 to below $5 (that would include $1 trial join Milfer).

The drop is from 65% (above $5) to about 30% (below $5). That "drop" I speak of is the trial joins converting to full price membership after trial.

What yu think?... better to have known and not made any monies then to have not known and still not making any monies

[The Porn Nerd]

If someone is paying PPS on $1 trials they are.....well, you do the math. I would stay the fuck away from them.

[Manfap]

pre approve the monthly charge at the time of the trial.

[anexsia]

Originally Posted by The Porn Nerd

If someone is paying PPS on $1 trials they are.....well, you do the math. I would stay the fuck away from them.

I promote a few programs that give $30-35 on $1/trials and they have been paying me on time for years, putting out great content, and the members rebill so not every trial sponsor is shit meanwhile there's a lot of non-trial/$1 programs I promote that convert like crap and don't rebill...

[iSpyCams]

Originally Posted by Manfap

pre approve the monthly charge at the time of the trial.

Yep. Either that or raise the trial price to $5. $5 is the new $1 and $1 is the new penny. Anyone willing to spend a dollar is willing to spend $5 unless they only have $1 and that's not a customer anyone wants, or unless they plan on signing up to a large number of sites, also not a customer anyone wants. Fraud affiliates usually try to sign up to as many cheap trials as possible as well so that's another good reason not to go too low.

Anyone with $1 trials is either banking on x sells or pre-approving a higher amount or isn't paying PPS or has a solid database of unproductive BIN #'s they can block.

PPS or not, it's just not worth it to do $1. $1 doesn't even cover the transaction cost with most billers I know of, I think an approved transactions costs around 1.24 most of the time between processing and gateway fees and even a decline isn't free. That's why CCBill and Epoch have higher minimums.

[takethebluepill]

What they said..

If a program is paying for $1 or free trials, then it's pretty much guaranteed that they are scamming the surfer with a slew of cleverly hidden xsales.

There's better ways to make money in this industry without supporting scum like that.

[mineistaken]

Originally Posted by pompousjohn

Yep. Either that or raise the trial price to $5.

So are the prepaid cards loaded with $4.99? Otherwise I am not sure who does $5 eliminates OP's worry about not being able to charge more duie to the card being prepaid

[The Porn Nerd]

Originally Posted by anexsia

I promote a few programs that give $30-35 on $1/trials and they have been paying me on time for years, putting out great content, and the members rebill so not every trial sponsor is shit meanwhile there's a lot of non-trial/$1 programs I promote that convert like crap and don't rebill...

Well, that may be true but just because a PPS Program is paying out like clockwork on $1 Trials does not mean they aren't also card-banging, cross-selling, x-selling and all the other 'tricks' to fuck surfers. Do the math, as this wise man just pointed out:

Originally Posted by pompousjohn

Yep. Either that or raise the trial price to $5. $5 is the new $1 and $1 is the new penny. Anyone willing to spend a dollar is willing to spend $5 unless they only have $1 and that's not a customer anyone wants, or unless they plan on signing up to a large number of sites, also not a customer anyone wants. Fraud affiliates usually try to sign up to as many cheap trials as possible as well so that's another good reason not to go too low.

Anyone with $1 trials is either banking on x sells or pre-approving a higher amount or isn't paying PPS or has a solid database of unproductive BIN #'s they can block.

PPS or not, it's just not worth it to do $1. $1 doesn't even cover the transaction cost with most billers I know of, I think an approved transactions costs around 1.24 most of the time between processing and gateway fees and even a decline isn't free. That's why CCBill and Epoch have higher minimums.

The entire concept of a Trial is unattractive to me. It's a business model primarily based on people forgeting to cancel. Then, when they DO cancel, it's Hello Chargeback City. No thanks. Not to mention the insane hole you can dig yourself into when offering $50 PPS on a $29.95 Membership.

To me, ANY PPS should top out at the max price of the recurring offer so there's a CHANCE of making a profit (rebills). Of course, many whales would disagree with me. LOL

[iSpyCams]

Originally Posted by mineistaken

So are the prepaid cards loaded with $4.99? Otherwise I am not sure who does $5 eliminates OP's worry about not being able to charge more duie to the card being prepaid

I am not sure what all the various reasons are, but you can find a lot of people who will confirm for you that $5 seems to be the minimum for reasonable conversions.

I have spent way more time than is probably healthy obsessing over prepaid cards, and I find it's not the card being prepaid or not that makes the difference, it's the credit rating and income level of the customer. There's just a lot of irresponsible or unlucky people out there that seem to be on their last couple bucks of credit card or bank balance for whatever reason.

I recently did an experiment with 1.95 trials. It was the second one I've tried. The first time around I lost a lot of money, conversions were deplorable (under 20%) but that was a few years ago with a different affiliate team and this time it was a custom program that we put together with an affiliate who had good enough volume and a solid track record who specifically wanted the lowest $ trial offer we could do. For this affiliate we were competing with another program who has a $0 trial with a 29.95 cross sale in fine print. I don't do crosses of any kind, not that I am too ethical for that or anything, I just feel that keeping the card associations happy is complicated enough without playing games like that.

Anyway at 1.95 conversions hovered around 25% for 3 months, this is at a volume of ~100 joins/wk. 3 months is long enough to see that it wasn't going to work, obviously, I was pretty sure after 1 month but needed to convince my 100 joins/wk affiliate I was giving it every chance.

I raised the trial price to 4.95 and conversions rocketed to 55%, though we did see a 20-25% drop in overall volume, it seems pretty clear that the sales we didn't get were the ones that were never going to convert anyway. So that little increase in trial price turned an unprofitable 100 sales a week affiliate into a profitable 75 sales a week affiliate.

I also heard they are still promoting the competing $0 offer but are getting a lot of complaints from that program regarding poor conversions.

So to make a long story short, (even though it's a little late for that now) I don't know the exact reasons but I can make some well educated guesses, however it remains clear to me at least that $5 trials are the lowest amount that is viable for PPS programs without shady x-sells.

[Harmonizer]

Put aside the affiliate issue/fraud for now. I believe the growing number of porn buyers are simply buying multiple pre-paids cards and loading them with $5 or less. They don't want the hassle of reading fine print or having their bank card/cc banged.

Raise that trial to over $5 and you get rid of a ton of pre-paids but still get them. However, those prepaids convert much more often. The person who loads a prepaid above $5, likely loads it with $100 (or something significantly higher then $5) putting their max risk at that.

[Harmon]

This is one of those Indian shit hole fucks trying to play off of my name because I had them banned.

[The Porn Nerd]

Originally Posted by pompousjohn

I am not sure what all the various reasons are, but you can find a lot of people who will confirm for you that $5 seems to be the minimum for reasonable conversions.

I have spent way more time than is probably healthy obsessing over prepaid cards, and I find it's not the card being prepaid or not that makes the difference, it's the credit rating and income level of the customer. There's just a lot of irresponsible or unlucky people out there that seem to be on their last couple bucks of credit card or bank balance for whatever reason.

I recently did an experiment with 1.95 trials. It was the second one I've tried. The first time around I lost a lot of money, conversions were deplorable (under 20%) but that was a few years ago with a different affiliate team and this time it was a custom program that we put together with an affiliate who had good enough volume and a solid track record who specifically wanted the lowest $ trial offer we could do. For this affiliate we were competing with another program who has a $0 trial with a 29.95 cross sale in fine print. I don't do crosses of any kind, not that I am too ethical for that or anything, I just feel that keeping the card associations happy is complicated enough without playing games like that.

Anyway at 1.95 conversions hovered around 25% for 3 months, this is at a volume of ~100 joins/wk. 3 months is long enough to see that it wasn't going to work, obviously, I was pretty sure after 1 month but needed to convince my 100 joins/wk affiliate I was giving it every chance.

I raised the trial price to 4.95 and conversions rocketed to 55%, though we did see a 20-25% drop in overall volume, it seems pretty clear that the sales we didn't get were the ones that were never going to convert anyway. So that little increase in trial price turned an unprofitable 100 sales a week affiliate into a profitable 75 sales a week affiliate.

I also heard they are still promoting the competing $0 offer but are getting a lot of complaints from that program regarding poor conversions.

So to make a long story short, (even though it's a little late for that now) I don't know the exact reasons but I can make some well educated guesses, however it remains clear to me at least that $5 trials are the lowest amount that is viable for PPS programs without shady x-sells.

This is a classic "leaving money on the table" story (thanks for sharing it). I too have obsessed over pricing (not just trials) and discovered something interesting (to me) while doing the research. It seems there is a $5 'jump' that people do in their minds, meaning if they were willing to buy something chances are high that the extra $5 will not deter them from buying. Go above that $5 however and people put the brakes on.

This was most evident to me in regards to rebills. I used to offer $29.95 rebills at $24.95, mistakenly thinking that the extra savings would increase rebills. But then I discovered what I wrote above and raised the rebill price to $29.95. Absolutely ZERO differance in rebills!

So that was me leaving money on the table without knowing it. LOL I wonder how many people experience the same thing.

[iSpyCams]

Originally Posted by Harmonizer

Put aside the affiliate issue/fraud for now. I believe the growing number of porn buyers are simply buying multiple pre-paids cards and loading them with $5 or less. They don't want the hassle of reading fine print or having their bank card/cc banged.

Raise that trial to over $5 and you get rid of a ton of pre-paids but still get them. However, those prepaids convert much more often. The person who loads a prepaid above $5, likely loads it with $100 (or something significantly higher then $5) putting their max risk at that.

I have never seen a $5 prepaid card or even a $5 reload option. The lowest is $25 and there's usually a $5 activation fee. So now you got $20. The reason they decline for $5 is because you aren't the first purchase they made. Probably bought something else for 17.95 and now they need a way to get rid of 2 bucks on an otherwise useless card.

[Harmonizer]

Originally Posted by Harmon

This is one of those Indian shit hole fucks trying to play off of my name because I had them banned.

Don't get your pussy wet old man with freaky fetish.

[Harmonizer]

Originally Posted by pompousjohn

I have never seen a $5 prepaid card or even a $5 reload option. The lowest is $25 and there's usually a $5 activation fee. So now you got $20. The reason they decline for $5 is because you aren't the first purchase they made. Probably bought something else for 17.95 and now they need a way to get rid of 2 bucks on an otherwise useless card.

There is a market for it... one of the top results on google:

powerbot org/community/topic/999383-buying-5-prepaid-visa-rsgp/

add the dot and close the space. Not a long thread but certainly telling enough that there is a market for buying $5 pre-paids.

[Harmon]

Originally Posted by Harmonizer

Don't get your pussy wet old man with freaky fetish.

Old?

What? Are you 10?