You Can Have Mariah for Ten Bucks!

by Mariah Milano

When I first started looking around on the internet back in 1999 thinking about doing a site, memberships prices ranged from $19.99 to $30 a month. In most industries as products become established prices go down, like flat screen televisions for example. When plasma screen first came out they were crazy expensive, but now you can buy them for less than $500. They might not be the best technology on the market, but they are better than the ones that were first out for $3500. Even with this very common trend in most retail businesses porn sites have not budged much at all since the early days, even though there are tens of thousands of sites online, all competing for the same customers, and no one has gotten competitive with their prices, well until now. Sure you get an occasional discount or there are discounts for buying a 6 month or 1 year membership, but nothing that has been done specifically to address the slumping market, bad economy and of course, the overwhelming amount of content available for free.

I had done well with a $25 monthly membership a few years ago and decided to raise the price to just under $30 and sales actually went up. I’m not sure if it was because surfers thought it was better because it cost more, or it didn’t matter because it’s such an impulsive purchase. They sit there browsing around clicking links from TGP sites, looking for that one thing that turns them on and bam! They find your site and just can’t keep their hands out of their…wallets. The sale is made and everyone is satisfied.
 
So I was thinking the other day while I was sitting at a drawbridge for what felt like forever that maybe lowering prices would be a little more attractive to surfers. Yes they can go to a tube site and get videos for free, but the videos are almost always shitty quality flash versions and many are just clips rather than entire scenes, although many tube sites still offer full-length videos for download or stream. I figured that if you can offer the potential customer a good amount of high-quality content for a low price they might decide to get the high quality versions for literally pennies when you add up how much content a good site has, like mine for instance has over 1200 full-length videos for download. To me the $10 one month membership is an easily justified price for a really good amount of high quality content direct from the producer.
 
Many webmasters have said that they didn’t do well at all with lower prices because people thought it was too good to be true or it was going to be limited access to the content, or maybe they just thought "How good could a site for $10 be?" When I buy things like electronics I always tend to buy the more expensive item because I think I’m going to get a better product. I think it’s just the way we’ve been conditioned.
 
So far this experiment has worked better than I ever dreamed. Not only am I getting several times the amount of daily signups, hardly anyone is canceling their memberships. I also would imagine that chargebacks would be greatly reduced as someone might be less inclined to take the time and effort to make a fuss over a $10 charge. And in my experience, chargebacks are rarely ever due to credit card theft. Most are due to spouses finding the charge or in some cases it’s due to someone not getting what they thought they would based on promising free tours and misleading ads. Yes, there are instances of people getting charges they didn’t do, but it is far less common than the buyer’s remorse or pissed off wife.
 
I did get an email from an affiliate who didn’t like the reduced membership price because he wouldn’t make as much money "per click" that he sent to my site. But if you ask the owners of Freeones.com or TheBestPorn.com who have promoted me over the years how much more money they’ve made in the last 12 days they’ll tell you they have made more per day than they did before when the membership price was $25 per month.
 
I don’t want to say dollar amounts but I will say that since I started the promotion les than 2 weeks ago I have had over more than 12 times the average signups I would usually have, which more than justifies the loss in revenue from lowering the price by more than 70%. What started out as an idea for a one month promo has become a marketing strategy that I am pretty sure I’m going to stick with.  Someone recently pointed out that the cost of productions haven’t gone down so the membership prices have stayed steady as well. But if you think of just how many sites there are out there and how many more millions of people there are online these days to me that’s an invalid justification. I think we need to think more about working on a quantity basis with a smaller margin. I’ll really see how it has worked in a few months when the rebills are coming through and it’s been tested with different levels of traffic, but so far so great.

As people in the business as well as those of you who are members of sites or surfers who look at porn sites, I would love to hear your thoughts on this idea. Have you tried it and if so how did it work out for you? Shoot me an email mariah@mariahxxx.net
 
For a look at a great fucking site for only $10 for a month of full access, checkout my official mega-site MariahxXx.net! 🙂 I had to get a little self-promo thrown in there! 🙂

Mariah Milano
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