You can probably figure out why I am asking this, lol. I've had a few people ask me to create a membership site which would be pretty easy (I used to run a membership based site) but rather time consuming so I'm not sure if it's worth it. And to be clean I'm not asking if you would join my site, just membership sites in general.

Personally I am really picky about my kinks/fetish so I've only downloaded scenes that really turn me on even though paying for a monthly site would be more cost effective.

Unfortunately, Vidown no longer supports membership sites. Ditto UMD.

I guess you could set one up if you really wanted to, but it would have to be outside the usual WAM channels.

And if you're paying $40 a month for a membership site, you're absolutely not supporting a WAMmer, but rather a full-blown porn site. Even in the heyday of membership sites here, I think the top tier was $15 a month.

Yeah I certainly wouldn't be charging $40 a month, that seems excessive unless you have a huge amount of content with a wide variety and lots of different models.

I never heard of vidown but I already know what platform I would want to use. I prefer to have full control of a site if I am going to make one.

Usually, download sites win over membership because you can pick and choose, whereas with membership you can be stuck for a couple of months with only one scene that does anything for you, which makes that one scene pretty expensive.

Your own C4S (Leila) is a good example, as I've bought probably about a dozen clips from it (with at least as many more mentally earmarked!), but of course you have far more scenes available than that and so the point is I'm buying what I like, when I like, and am not tied in.

The only occasion I would join a membership site is under the specific circumstance of wanting a boatload of clips of what they do. So (and apologies if this is cynically playing the system), I sign up for the one month, one-off deal and scoop up what I want as a job lot - usually the price works out as either breaking even compared to getting all the clips/photo sets individually or perhaps slightly cheaper.

I haven't actually done that with WAM, funnily enough, but the lovely Fi Stevens in my avatar is the clue as I have done it a few times with non-WAM fetish sites she modelled for. In fact, that picture comes from one of them, a UK glamour site called "Hayley's Secrets".

It's very rare I comment on these forums, however, I somehow stumbled across this from Google and thought I'd share a little part of my experiences with you and provide some insights on the success of the site I currently work for...

Membership sites require frequent and regular high quality updates, probably every 2 weeks minimum. You will need a large initial financial outlay and will need to mass produce quality and popular content to ensure you update on a regimented schedule. You can't miss an update!

In contrast, with download sites, you can produce and update whenever you want without any strict regimented update schedule. The customer tends to pay more overall with a download store whereas users of membership sites tend to get better value which provides differing arguments depending on what side of the fence you are on, however, with membership sites you get the advantage of forecasting and you will likely be able to invest back into better quality shoots and grow more quickly.

I have now worked with over 23 fetish websites, about half and half in terms of download sites and membership sites, and from both my experience and those of the people around me, it's the membership sites that have always had the biggest budgets and capital investments. The people I work with now have always maintained that they will never move to a download site as it would diminish their brand and prevent them producing the content that they want to produce. They insist the budgets would be cut and that they would no longer have the ability to take risks, making the website too mainstream and 'average', and that's nothing against mainstream websites by the way, but you surely get their point.

It is important to note at this stage that although they produce 'wam' videos, the people I work for are not 'wammers', they are not part of the community and probably don't even really fully understand the messy fetish, yet they do seem to have great success in their website and have put in a lot of market research.

I think the bottom line is, if you are serious and want to do this as a long term business then the recommendation I would have would be the Membership site, however, if you want to do it more as a hobby to earn a few extra bucks, not take it too seriously, then go for the download site.

Either way, I wish you the very best of luck.

I definitely prefer to pay for and download individual scenes. A membership site might have a bunch of videos every month, but I might only like a few of them.

Thanks MessyMistress for the insight. I do want to get to the point where I am producing enough high quality content to do 2 video updates a week but since I am doing this by myself the work load I already have is overwhelming at times. It would be great if I could hire an assistant or find someone to be a business partner but most people in my area only model or produce part time. I only know two full time producers and they do bondage & bdsm which is probably easier to make a profit off of since it's basically mainstream (at least compared to wam).

I theoretically love the idea of membership sites and I historically belonged to Messyworld, Messy Angel and Gunge Girls. I find the experience extremely satisfying. I have very specific tastes, so membership sites can be frustrating if they are too varied in content. Nonetheless, I still find it enjoyable if even one video per month pushes my buttons, even though that is technically not a great value for me.

I suspended my membership to Gunge Girls because Noise got into a bad habit of not holding up his end if the subscription bargain and sometimes months would pass without an update.

I held onto Messy Angel and Messy World longer, but they have moved away from my core interests of cellulose slime and bdsm. I still think they are great sites, but I am not into foam or foodplay and it's been a while since either site has posted a video I was into.

I think, if you want to run a membership site, it needs variety of models, but continuity of content. A lot of sites will have the same few girls getting messy in different scenarios or mess and I don't think that is appealing to the male brain.

I suspect most men (the major consumers of porn) have a particular micro-fetish and just want to see essentially the same video made with lot's of different models. Take, for example, a site like Facial Abuse, which is wildly successful. They basically make the same video over and over.

If there was a site that just had a new girl every month getting methylcellulose slime dumped on her head, I would be a lifetime subscriber. (In fact, this is basically what Gunge Girls was for years).

Isn't there an option missing from the poll - membership site with downloads? I'd never join a membership site that only allowed streaming, as it'd be necessary to keep a permanent subscription to access the scenes. But I have occasionally joined membership sites that have downloadable content. I will admit I mostly buy from download stores these days though, and Saturation Hall makes rather more income from downloads than from memberships, even though the membership site, as long as you like a variety of content, is better value. For someone who joins us as a member, and re-joins every six months, and likes and downloads everything we release, they are effectively paying $3.56 per scene. However if someone only likes a subset of our work (a specific model, or only boilersuit scenes, or only mud, or whatever), buying the downloads makes more sense.

I think I know what platform you're looking at, having recently discovered that MM actually encourages us to have more than one outlet (for the last few years I'd thought about it but assumed that would be disloyal to MM and the UMD), I'm thinking of opening a store over there too, esp now I know you can increase the payout threshold from the default to mean fewer, larger payouts and hence losing far less in bank charges - I don't mind paying site operators but hate giving transaction fee money to banks. But as I run my own membership site on my own physical servers, I'd not looked at their membership options - do they only do them streaming?

Only way I'd join a streaming-only site is if I had the feed hooked up to a TV and an open PVR, so I could record the content and convert into files to keep. Not to pirate or share, just keep for my own use. Kind of like taping scenes off the TV back in the day.


People doing this kind of thing (and it's been around for years) are why Saturation Hall only does six month memberships for $50. I have looked into coding a system that would allow someone to sign up for a recurring monthly subscription, where initially they would only get that month's release, but then for every month they remained a member, as well as the new stuff being released every month they would also get access to one month "backwards" from when they first joined, and the two months, and so on. However it'd be very complex to code as it needs to track and calculate from the point each different member signs up, there'd be people who's memberships cancelled due to failed credit cards or whatever who'd want to re-join but push their "back" access back to where it had previously reached on their old membership (which would mean being able to link new and old accounts in a way that was easy for me to operate but wouldn't allow people to try and "share" accounts, so very detailed per-account IP tracking would be needed), and then invariably people would try and get clever and guess the URLs of older scenes they didn't have access to yet (or "share" from a mate's account) so the whole system would have to be built with individual links that would only work for each specific account and throw errors for anyone else, and that'd mean each member account would actually be a full-blown Unix account on the server, which brings in a whole bunch of new security issues.

From a programming and sysadmin point of view I could do it, but it'd be hard work and a lot of very complex code, combining Perl-based cron-driven access mechanisms with PHP-driven access controls on the front end, all interacting with each other for potentially hundreds of accounts, and having to be rock solid reliable no matter what was thrown at it.

Download stores are just a lot easier - I halted the development I'd started on monthly rolling membership when the UMD launched its store system.

I am actually considering opening a second membership site and making things more specialised - all gunge / food on one and all mud / water on the other, but I need to be sure I can reliably double my release frequency before taking the plunge.

sell by the clip. no brainer

It sounds as though it could be done relatively easily by comparing the upload date with the users signup date on each page load, then just chuck either a 404 error if you're being sneaky or a 403 otherwise, if the user shouldn't have access; though obviously this depends on the specifics of your site and the data/datastores available. Memberships expiring and then being renewed at a later date would be a complication, but you could get around this a few ways; either keep a count of consecutive months for each user and update this either via cron monthly (but with a daily job as signup dates would differ), or if you can store the expiry date & signup date against each user you could work it out again on each page load with a pretty minimal performance hit - you could do it all in SQL if that's what you're using for backend storage.

I choose to go with the download store rather then a membership site primarily because I have more control over my content.

With a monthly membership site some one can join with and download every video then go and share it on a tubesite or torrents. You risk having all of your content uploaded at once destroying your back catalog.

With a download store it limits this because you would have to purchase each video and I have an idea who bought it. This way if a video is shared I have a good idea on who did it.

Mind you it is not full proof but it does help stop it to a degree.

The easiest option is clips. The investment of a membership site with payment processing is $1,000. 500/visa 500/ mastercard. Between sessions, modeling and producing I live well... But wam is just for the love of mess.