In the wake of the collapsing advertising revenue from Corona, I have been looking at other ways of running a website so that I don't have to pay for it. There are many possibilities, but for now I have decided to sell premium access to my users. It is important to me that users without this premium access do not suffer any disadvantage and so the premium access concentrates on the following things:
- No commercial breaks
- No tracking blocks (Google Analytics)
- Visual highlighting of premium users
I tried it out in the forum of minecraft-server.eu, where over 100,000 members are registered. With the help of Xenforo user upgrades, the technical part was done quickly. Basically, I only had to think about a subscription model and connect Paypal to the forum. As soon as someone decides to get a premium account, the payment process is done via Paypal and then you get back to the forum where you immediately get the premium account. Manual work is only required for invoicing and accounting.
How much may a premium access in a forum cost?
That is an exciting question. For this forum, I have considered that access should not be too expensive. After all, we don't have any exclusive content and hardly any editorially prepared texts. For this reason, I have set a monthly fee of 2.50 euros for the minecraft-server.eu forum. However, since Paypal fees are deducted from the 2.50 euros and I have to create and send the invoices manually, you can only book the premium access for 6 and 12 months.
Finally, the only thing left for me to do was to make the premium access public. I'll make an announcement with all the information. I didn't want to make more than this announcement. I also didn't want to exclude people who still surf with an AdBlocker.
How much did I earn with the premium accesses?
It's been over a month since this announcement - time to look at how many premium accesses have been sold:
| Advertising free for 6 months | Advertising free for 12 months |
| 4 | 4 |
This results in a total income of 172 euros. But I have to deduct the fee for Paypal (7 euros) and the VAT (23 euros). (23 euros). That leaves 142 euros.
Conclusion
I don't really know what to think about the result. In any case, 142 euros is a nice sum that I wouldn't have without this attempt. On the other hand, 142 euros are not enough to run the forum for a month. In addition, I assume that there will be hardly any more subscriptions in the future and that these 142 euros will have to be enough for 6 to 12 months. That's why I don't see any alternative in premium accesses like the one I tried. They are more a way for regular visitors to contribute to the costs, but the masses will not use them.
How then?
I think that if the accesses were made more lucrative, i.e. if instead of being free of advertising, more beautification functions and extended functions for the forum were sold and these were also advertised more aggressively, more money could be earned - but that is going too far for me. All that remains for me is the realisation that of the few users who really want to get involved, most don't really care about things like advertising and analysis tools, and the assumption that optics functions would sell much better.
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