A Discussion on Pro Account Revenues and Our Strategy

Prateek Dayal posted

Hey Everyone

Nithya and I wanted to write a post and talk to the community about Muziboo, Pro Accounts and related stuff. Here is what we have seen in the last six months or so

• Ads don’t pay us much. They are a small portion of our revenues and generally fall off over time. To make $x in ads every month, you need more traffic every coming month

• All techniques of ad placement that result in more clicks generally compromise on the user experience. This is one reason why we shutoff ads for pro users.

• A lot of people do use the pro features once they upgrade to pro. Things like reuploading, high bitrate streaming and to some extent even private sharing. Stats is still picking up and not a mainstream feature yet.

However we still sell a very few pro accounts every month and so far we have tried to compensate it with ads but its not really working out very well. We would rather focus on making the site more friendly for users and hope that they like it enough to convert to pros. For those who don’t know,

• Nithya and I have been working on Muziboo fulltime for last 1.5 years for no pay.

• We are self funded and have put in our savings into Muziboo. We have not raised any money for it (yet) and don’t plan to. For most investors a music community is not a business and our visions don’t align.

• The service has been pretty much covering its operational expenses (not our salary though) but the recent growth makes us concerned about our increasing storage and processing costs.

We are considering lowering the upload limit for new accounts (not existing) and having more features in the future for pro members so that people have more reasons for upgrading. I wanted to ask the community what features they think will make it more compelling for them to upgrade to pro. Here is a list we are currently working on

• Higher bitrate for pros (prob. 192 kbps streaming)

We are also planning to pull back some ads and clean up some pages to have a better user experience. I would also like to know if people have any doubts or reservations about pro, paying online or other stuff which is stopping them from upgrading. If you prefer to send your responses privately, please email me at prateek@muziboo.com. However we would appreciate a discussion here. We are willing to answer any other questions you have about Muziboo too.

Finally, thanks to all for being a part of Muziboo and helping us grow and make this a fun place.

Posted on February 09, 2009