With the introduction of the subscription groups in 7.3 I'm after some insight in to your implementation of this feature. Are you doing something similar already?
I switched my board over to totally subscriber base last June. At that time, I had 11,000+ members. I'd say only about 6,000 were "active". To date, out of those 6,000 I've had 2,012 pay to subscribe to access my board.
What prices will/do you charge for subscriptions?
$15.75 for a year, or $3 monthly
I based my price on that of a magazine subscription for similar content (fishing)
What do your members get for subscribing?
Less idiots. Seriously. The amount of time myself and the moderators spend dealing with problems is almost non-existent now.
I'll soon be making some changes to my board to allow more access for non-subscribers. At that point, I'll be shutting down PM rights for the non-subscribers. The PM community on my board is huge.
What time period (One time payment, monthly, quarterly, etc.)?
Most of my users opted for yearly. But I did offer a $3 monthly plan option (which actually ends up costing the user more than the yearly).
Some Advice for Anyone Considering the Subscriber RouteI could write a lot about the subscriber-based board, but I'll just try to touch on a few things to start...
- In my opinion, there are 3 reasons to go subscriber-base:
1. Weed out trouble-makers
2. Revenue
3. Give the subscribers more options than the regular member
- As you can guess, users will fall into three groups when they learn they all of a sudden have to pay: those who are into it, those who aren't sure, and those who will tell you to piss off. I heard from the best and worst kinds of people when I switched my board. I went through a bit of hell making the change.
- A subscriber-based site isn't for all kinds of communities. It works well for mine (a fishing community in a small state). Fishermen can be protective of what info. they post, and they like having some privacy and control of who can read their posts.
- When I switched my board, I switched 95% of the forums to subscriber-only. There are positives and negatives to that kind of all or nothing decision. In hindsight, I have no regrets. But, make no mistake, no matter how rabid your users, you will lose some of them when they find they have to pay.
- When I started, I used a SirDude hack to get the bulk of my early subs ID'd in Threads, but now I currently manage my subs manually. It's kind of a pain, so I am really looking forward to seeing how well 7.3 meshes with PayPal. There are all kinds of little things to consider with PayPal: people's emails are sometimes different for their PayPal account than their Threads account, credit cards expire or change and that triggers an automatic subscription cancellation (which confuses users)
- There are always going to be people who don't want to use PayPal for whatever reason. For those people, you have to give another payment option. I let that group subscribe by mail. I've got 300 of those users that I'll have to figure out a plan for renewals.
