I had a member ask me recently about the value of upgrading to a premium membership, I told him that I'm not the one to ask as I've just joined and have just checked out a few of the standard vids, guy plays at $20 non turbo though and was wondering about whether it would be worth paying the much steeper premium membership. Now the argument may be made that the premium membership caters to the mid stake players and above, thus the price, but I think that the way things are structured the site is missing out here. I do applaud the effort to make membership more accessible by putting the standard membership in place, I've seen lots of feedback previously that had people saying they would give this site a whirl if not for the high membership fee, folks are used to paying around $25 a month at pretty much all the other ones so that was a good price point. Making the jump to premium shouldn't be so difficult, ideally these players on the fence should be finding out this info for themselves, the fence is too high though going from $25 to a minimum investment of $120. I feel that from a marketing perspective the site would be better served to look to entice this segment a little more, or should I say dissuade them less, by changing the structure from $120 for a month, $160 for three, to something more reasonable like $60 a month or $160 for three, thus still providing a discount for longer signups while cutting in half the entry point. Try it out for a month in other words, not a lot more than you're paying now, and for the regulars the revenue steam won't change but for those looking to get a taste of what the other vids have to offer you're not scaring most of them off, with the net result being more premium members, meaning more revenue ;)
It used to be 60ish but I think they raised it becaus you can go through and download all the videos and then not renew your membership he next month.
I would say for a 20 dollar player the standard is fine (those are the stakes I play an that membership works for me) I plan on upgrading to premium once I'm playing the 50s because it's less than a 3 buy in investment.
The main reasons it is a big price jump are: 1) As Aces said, the initial month is $120, but if somebody wants 3 months it's 55 a month for 3 months ($165). There are over 200 videos on the site now, probably 100 or so for the Standard Membership and another 100 or so extra for the premium, so that's a lot of videos.2) Our Standard videos that you get for $25 a month already dwarf anything out there as far as heads up sng videos go. The Premium content is by far light years ahead of anything anywhere else as well. If you look at other sites, even sites with competition, some are charging a lot of money (PokerxFactor has competition and a hefty sign up fee, Cardrunners has a sign up fee). There is nowhere else to go for this information, therefore it is fairly valuable.3) We made our Standard price cheaper than the value that we feel it offers. We did this for several reasons, but the main one was to attract some smaller budget players and help them improve their game faster, grow their role, on the assumption that if our site brings them value, they will be more inclined to upgrade.So those are the main factors. Given you can go to a place like DC and get 6 heads up sng videos for your $30 fee, all by one guy (haven't seen those, but I know the guy is not a heads up sng regular there), or CR and get maybe 10-15 videos by a single husng pro for whatever their price is now, I think our access to over 100 videos by 8+ instructors for $25, and 200+ videos from 10+ instructors up to the highest stakes played online for $120 is going to to represent a much greater value than you can find anywhere else, without a question.There's also ways to get an idea of what we offer. For example, the main difference in Standard and Premium is that Premium includes videos above the $55 buyin level (Standard rarely does). But all the videos are from the same instructors in each tier, so you can watch a Skates $33 dollar video or a xSCWx $55 video and get a good idea of the quality of their instruction in the Premium tier, where they make videos at $100 and beyond. You can also talk to Premium members on the forums and get their views, see which specific videos are out there in the Premium tier by browswing our catalog of videos and if all else fails: You can sign up for rakeback via rakeback.husng.com and it's pretty easy to earn a free month subscription ($250 MGR, that's half what sites like Leggo require, and our premium membership is more expensive and contains more unique videos you can't find anything similar to anywhere else).Let me know if you have any questions, but if we made the regular tier something like $60, we would almost certainly not be able to afford the top class instructors that we have here already.
"but if we made the regular tier something like $60, we would almost certainly not be able to afford the top class instructors that we have here already."That sounds like retention is a big issue for you. I assume that most members don't last beyond the 3 months and if you just made it $60 a month then although they can save $15 by taking the 3 month package, too many would only stick for a month or two. Now even if this were the case though, the other side of the equation is the potential new revenue you may get from attracting players who don't want to commit $120+ without even checking it out. So even if your retention isn't anything to hoot about, this still could be significantly more profitable, you're decreasing your average profit per member but by adding more of them your overall profit could easily increase. Whether or not this would be the case in practice is another matter, again it depends on your retention rate and how big the market is that's not being served but there's some potential for gain there, no one expects you to sacrifice profit to serve players, it's all about making more money not less. I've been promoting poker through various means for a number of years, players do tend to be on the cheap side, at least most of them anyway, and even though some other sites have used front loading, that doesn't mean it's ideal, and there's a movement away from this lately. I've even seen affiliates bemoan the price of membership, and considering they are paid to promote you, that's saying a lot. You don't have to drop it all the way down to $60, but there may be a point here where setting a monthly price more in line with what people are more willing to pay, which surely is less than $120, might be worth considering.With that all said though, this is a great value, and a very sorely needed service in a market pretty much untapped. Thanks for taking the time to reply, in the end it's your business and I'm sure that you know what you're doing, a little feedback here and there can't hurt though :)
I didn't mean to imply that retention was the issue. If retention were low, I think lowering the cost would make sense since it would represent a weaker value of the product and the gap would not be justified. But with good retention, it is evident that the quality of the product is both good and enough people recognize that. It then becomes much easier to be able to keep the quality of the product high and to actually improve it over time.If you look at what other sites devote to heads up sngs, and the budgets that they have, in order for us to have the kind of content we do available, in particular at the $25 price point, we have to have a pretty decent interest level.But we're always looking for ways to grow and interested in feedback or even ideas. If it's one thing that we can learn from poker, is that new viewpoints and ideas are rarely a bad thing and that everybody always has plenty to keep learning.
Well to simplify things let's ignore the $120 one month deal, I'd be surprised if many people signed up with that, it's only a few bucks more for 2 extra months. So we've got the 3 month deal, the advantage of this to you is people purchasing memberships in 3 month lots, so every time someone does this where they would have otherwise only stayed for 1 or 2 months you gain the extra months obtained here. On the other side of it every time someone would have purchased a membership for one month but balked at the package deal you gain the entire lifetime revenue from these players. You also gain whenever people upgrade their membership to give it a try. So really it comes down to how long people are staying, if everyone stayed then it would be a no brainer, having lower pricing on the monthly deal will surely attract more people, and each new member you get is pure profit. That's unrealistic though, people come and go and the revenue you lose this way and this is something you're already going to have a good idea about, so it really depends on the market that's being missed here by this. As you go along the success of the standard membership will give you some idea here, it's the same principle at work really, capturing those who aren't prepared to pay $160 but would go for less, there may be some people who would have paid it but opt for the $25, there's going to be new people who join who never would have otherwise, in this case it's almost a no brainer since we're talking two different offerings here and I doubt many premium members are going to downgrade so it's pretty much pure profit here and was a great idea in order to expand your revenues. So now it comes down to considering what may be lost versus both attracting new premium members and also getting standard members to upgrade, those who would not have upgraded under the current scheme, and I think the latter has some real potential. There's a lot of people who tend to be conservative here and like to commit themselves incrementally, especially starting out, there's an opportunity to do some research here with the current database, perhaps polling standard members to see what sort of interest there may be, gauging their interest for each option, for instance how interested would you be in upgrading to the 3 month deal, very, somewhat, slightly, none, and the same thing for a lower monthly deal. Now this is going to be somewhat biased as people will naturally prefer less committment but if you see a big gap here then you've got some useful info, and you can extrapolate this to the general market as it will be similar, then you look at your retention level and project the cost of this and get a better idea of what potential is here for this.So it's really all about looking for ways to expand things both in terms of members and revenue and once again I applaud you for taking the step to open things up with the standard membership deal, I really like this site and I want it to do well, as you say there's nothing else like it around, maybe you're absolutely right in the current structure being best, you're in the best position to judge this obviously, my view is simply from the peanut gallery as my Dad used to say, but there might be a pile more peanuts that can be captured here and it's worth thinking about anyway :)