January 18/06: The Trial Trap

It wasn't always like this.

Trials used to be a good deal. You paid something like $5 and got three or four days access to a site. Full access.

Then along came a scam known as the "limited trial." It was a scam because you did not get full access. What you got was limited access. And in some cases you got extremely limited access. Maybe all of one episode, or teasers you could just as easily have downloaded for free. What made this a scam was the fact that few of the sites pulling this stunt made any mention on their Join page or anywhere else on the tour that this is what you were getting. When you joined you got a nasty surprise. And it was a surprise because most buyers expected to be getting full access.

I remember hitting the fucking roof the first time I came across this practice. It was when I was reviewing Bookworm Bitches. I blew the whistle as loud as I could, and called on other review sites to do the same (and to their credit, most of them joined the cause). Back then though it was just a few bad apples that you had to watch out for. For most sites a trial was still full access.

Not anymore. Now that both OxPass and All Sites Access have also gone over to the dark side  it seems as though limited trials are no longer the exception but the rule.

Buyer beware. Limited trials aren't worth it. It really is ridiculous how cheap and shitty they are. At All Sites now you only get the first part of each episode. Talk about paying for a tease! That really sucks. 

Now a lot of the sites doing this are actually worth the full monthly rate. OxPass, All Sites, the Perfect Gonzo line-up (All Internal, Ass Traffic, Sperm Swap) all have limited trials now, but they're all worth paying for a full membership anyway. It's not like I'm saying they're bad sites. They're just sites behaving badly. 

So why did this happen? You can understand part of the reason. The fact is, even when you join a good site you can usually get everything you want out of them in a couple of hours. Maybe longer if you have a slow connection. In any event, the vast majority of us are probably done with a site well within the three or four days that make up the average trial period--unless the site has a mad update schedule or it's a performer with a camshow or something you don't want to miss. It's the nature of most pornography that you get sick of it pretty quick, and then have to go looking for your next fix.

It didn't take paysite operators long to figure all this out, and that for 90% of porn consumers three days was every bit as good as 30. So how to retain? Some tried discounting an extension to your membership (pay $9.95 more, for example, to take your 3-day trial up to a full month). But that's not as effective to your bottom line as shafting people with a worthless trial and then forcing them to shell out the full monthly membership to get what they thought they were paying for in the first place.

So is it understandable? Sure. And with more and more people using faster and faster connections, it obviously makes sense from a business point of view. My problem with it is this: If, for business reasons, you don't want to offer a full trial THEN DON'T OFFER A TRIAL AT ALL! Stop ripping people off with phony ones!

Some review sites have now started warning people off all trials, period. In addition to the limited access scam there's also the trick where if you don't cancel fast enough you get stuck with an even higher rebill than if you had initially joined for a month. I've never been caught by that one, but it's still an issue (to protect myself, I always cancel a membership right after I join anyway).

Given how desperate sites are becoming to squeeze those extra dollars out of us, I regretfully find myself having to second these blanket warnings. I say "regretfully" because I have always purchased trial memberships in the past and rarely regretted it. As I began by saying, they used to be a really good deal. But for the obvious reasons mentioned, I suspect they are on their way out. Fewer and fewer paysites will be offering full access trials. And since those that don't aren't going to tell you, if I was one of the ones that still did I would start advertising that fact all over my tour ("Trial Memberships offer FULL ACCESS!!!"). But unless or until you see a message like that, I'd assume the worst. The trials have, unfortunately, become a trap.

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