A $2K bid just came in, a very respectable first bid
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Some information on Paid versus Free Memberships to the website.
We activated a Membership feature three months ago.
Basically the website has been operating as a FREE website to gain membership.
The feature allows us to enable/disable access to portions of the website for certain membership levels.
As an experiment we locked down the Search for Users section and asked members to upgrade to a 'Full Access' Membership for $2.35 monthly recurring payment.
We have 15 recurring payments active and it is growing. About 40% cancels their recurring payment after they figure out its just the Search feature they unlock ;)
Yet we get enough new recurring payments in to be at 15 active and growing to counter that.
Also only 1 out of 20 members actually goes ahead with the membership upgrade after they click the link for it (lots of room for improvement there, not sure if the PayPal payment screen scares them away).
I expect that just the recurring payments will cover the server cost in 5-6 months with the current section locked down. Of course more sections can be locked down, or everything can be made free.
It's a simple click on the very useful ADMINISTRATION section of the website ;)