This is the weekend we raise rates.
The new rate structure (as of Monday) will be:
- $149/month
- $399/quarter
- $1,299/year
Members can lock in the old rates today, which will last until they expire, so if you wish to switch to an annual subscription a just $799, you can do that at: http://www.philstockworld.com/amember/member.php . If you need any help, just drop Jared a line at admin@philstockworld.com but my understanding is that if you cancel your current subscription, then add an annual one, that should lock you in at the current rates and your annual subscription won’t start until your current quarterly or monthly one expires.
On a go forward basis, nobody who is currently a member will ever pay those rates anyway. I am a big believer in rewarding loyalty and I've come up with a system I think is very fair for all.
Original 2006 members will get a 20% discount on the new subscription prices and 2007 members will get a 10% discount. As of Jan 1st, all members bump up 10% in discount category and will continue to do so annually through 35%. This is a good way to reward people who've been with us from the beginning as anyone who is a current member and renews through '08 at $799 would get at least a 30% discount in 2009, which would make the current annual fee (it will be more by then) just $910.
In addition to this I've come up with a structure to address the needs of those who would like to pay even less, since most of us have either time OR money, but rarely both, there are now 3 ways to get your subscription for free in exchange for some of your valuable time:
#1 – Refer people to the premium site. Every active member you bring in that is referred by you will get you a 10% discount on your next renewal. That means that anyone who is currently a member and refers just 8 people over the course of the next year will have a free membership in '09. These discounts remain in force as long as the members you refer remain active.
#2 – Refer people to the paid newsletter. As of Jan 1st, the majority of our content will no longer be available on the free site. There will be a subscription for that content, probably $39/month, $99/qtr, $299/yr and each person you refer to that newsletter will earn a 2.5% discount, so it will take 32 referrals to move into free status (as nobody reading this right now will have less than a 20% base discount).
#3 – Give people a free newsletter. We're still going to send our a free something or other daily, currently it's through Feedburner but our experience shows us that 1 out of 100 of our free site readers convert to membership every month and it's a nice, slow, steady process that works really well from an integration standpoint so we're going to give a 1% credit for anyone you sign up for the FREE newsletter too. The only problem with this is we can't track it (Feedburner doesn't do that), so you would have to give us a list of names and the email addresses they sign up with so we can verify it. We hope to get a better system but that's the one we have for now and it is literally money for nothing!
Why does number 3 work? Well, we have 500 subscribers now and perhaps 5,000 people who read the free site every day. If we assume the conversion rate is 1%, then it makes sense that, if all 500 of you went out and got 100 new readers, we would eventually end up with 500 new people (at the higher rates of course). By itself, not very sexy in terms of total revenue growth but our hopes are that 20% or more of the free readers will convert to the cheap newsletter subscription, which solves our problem of adding paying members without having 3,000 people in chat!
So that's the newsletter business in a nutshell. We're going to be bringing in some more writers to develop premium services and you guys will get to enjoy them while they, like Happy Trading and Zman, build an audience of their own. I think my new system of having the paid newsletter will provide a better interim platform and an expanded readership should help us get more talented contributors down the road. Since eyeballs = money on the web (although you couldn't tell from the pittance Google pays us from Adsense) we'll attract a good talent pool a la SeekingAlpha (who do not pay their writers but seem to get plenty) and, over the long haul, I agree with Rupert Murdoch, who feels a free on-line WSJ may end up making more money than the subscription-based one, which has about 800,000 subscribers.
We're also going to be opening up an official column for member contributions in the new format, which you can check out over at http://philstockworld.webdesignid.com/ and we welcome any comments about it on this post as the system goes live next weekend. If you click on a post, you go to the wider version with comments and that's the last thing we are cleaning up before we go live, hopefully the comment section will be identical to our current one once we're done with it, as I'm pretty happy with the current format.
So thanks to everyone as we enter our second year of the membership site, it's still very early in the process but I'm looking forward to building a great investment community and I couldn't be more proud than I am with the quality of the members we have so far! Nothing would make me happier than to start giving out free memberships and I will be working very hard this year to make it as easy as possible for you to have something here that you will be proud to refer a friend to!
All the best,
– Phil
