Ok, so here's a thread that's sure to evoke a lot of discussion, and knowing my luck, abuse. Still, I am hoping there will be some constructive ideas offerred as well.
Here's the deal.
The website is successful. We have a lot of members, we also have a lot of models. In fact, we have too many models! Evidence of this is when people get grumpy with models who appear in "upcoming" today, do not appear on the site for six to eight weeks as standard, and sometimes longer.
We have a lot of models on our "to be shot" list - 59 right now - and we have around 75 models shot but not yet on the site. We're interviewing between 10 and 20 new models every week, around four of them are "keepers", and we're shooting around four a week. We're adding around three or four models a week to the site, so we have no hope of lowering both the number of models to shoot, or the time it takes for models to appear on the site.
Soooo, we have a few options:
(1) add more models to the site each week
(2) put ~half of all models on a different site
(3) shoot less models
I am hesitant to put more models on the regular (non-gold) site each week for a few reasons. Firstly, if we did that, we'd kinda have to charge more, which I do not want to do. Secondly, it's kind of over-captialising.
There are only so many models one average person can "consume" in a week. More than that is a waste - it does no justice to the model or myself as a photographer. Some sites, like ATK, add four or five new models every day to their site. I guess the theory is, every day you have a good chance of SOMETHING satisfying you (our goal is to have at least 50% of the models satisfying you on a given week, though plenty of people get pissed off if one image from one set is unlikable!).
I think we have hit a sweet spot of adding three to four new models a week. We never get complaints about there not being enough content, for example (a few years ago, when we were adding one model a week, we sure did get complaints). From a business point of view, simply adding more models to the site cos we can is a waste of capital investment.
We could add a new section to the Gold area, "overflow", and add models there, but I think the Gold section is pretty good value as it is, especially when we start adding two new GGT3's every month.
We could start a new site, perhaps "in competition" with this site, and randomly choose to put half the models we shoot on each site. We'd probably do some kinda deal, join AW2, and get AW1 for cheap, or something (and all existing customers would get AW2 for a few months for nix, or something). That's a fair bit of work, but it would be made easier by the fact we have a great CMS to manage the content, close ties with GMBill.com to manage the billing, and we know how to market to that audience.
The new site would probably have a lot less "soul", and less personality about it, it'd just present the content as is. No discussion boards or blog page, either. More bare-bones.
Of course, we could just be more selective in the models we shoot, but I like the models we shoot now, damnit. It's hard to turn away people like Anthea, and we have a lot of them coming up.
So, uh, whatcha think?
a
Here's the deal.
The website is successful. We have a lot of members, we also have a lot of models. In fact, we have too many models! Evidence of this is when people get grumpy with models who appear in "upcoming" today, do not appear on the site for six to eight weeks as standard, and sometimes longer.
We have a lot of models on our "to be shot" list - 59 right now - and we have around 75 models shot but not yet on the site. We're interviewing between 10 and 20 new models every week, around four of them are "keepers", and we're shooting around four a week. We're adding around three or four models a week to the site, so we have no hope of lowering both the number of models to shoot, or the time it takes for models to appear on the site.
Soooo, we have a few options:
(1) add more models to the site each week
(2) put ~half of all models on a different site
(3) shoot less models
I am hesitant to put more models on the regular (non-gold) site each week for a few reasons. Firstly, if we did that, we'd kinda have to charge more, which I do not want to do. Secondly, it's kind of over-captialising.
There are only so many models one average person can "consume" in a week. More than that is a waste - it does no justice to the model or myself as a photographer. Some sites, like ATK, add four or five new models every day to their site. I guess the theory is, every day you have a good chance of SOMETHING satisfying you (our goal is to have at least 50% of the models satisfying you on a given week, though plenty of people get pissed off if one image from one set is unlikable!).
I think we have hit a sweet spot of adding three to four new models a week. We never get complaints about there not being enough content, for example (a few years ago, when we were adding one model a week, we sure did get complaints). From a business point of view, simply adding more models to the site cos we can is a waste of capital investment.
We could add a new section to the Gold area, "overflow", and add models there, but I think the Gold section is pretty good value as it is, especially when we start adding two new GGT3's every month.
We could start a new site, perhaps "in competition" with this site, and randomly choose to put half the models we shoot on each site. We'd probably do some kinda deal, join AW2, and get AW1 for cheap, or something (and all existing customers would get AW2 for a few months for nix, or something). That's a fair bit of work, but it would be made easier by the fact we have a great CMS to manage the content, close ties with GMBill.com to manage the billing, and we know how to market to that audience.
The new site would probably have a lot less "soul", and less personality about it, it'd just present the content as is. No discussion boards or blog page, either. More bare-bones.
Of course, we could just be more selective in the models we shoot, but I like the models we shoot now, damnit. It's hard to turn away people like Anthea, and we have a lot of them coming up.
So, uh, whatcha think?
a
Comment