Quote:
Originally Posted by grownassman
To be perfectly honest, husng.com may still have good content, but they've priced themselves out of the market. I assume it was when the poker economy took a hit in the US and husng.com saw profits taking a hit, they assumed raising prices was the answer. Not sure how that's working out, but I predict not very well, since I was a regular customer before the silly pricing and packaging structure. It's like they are trying to nickel and dime instead of relying on quality and a user friendly structure. I'm curious, but not enough to go back and I still have a 9% roi at the 100s since leaving about 1.5 years ago. I guess I'm not missing too much.
Hi,
- When we made our changes about a year ago we outlined the reasons.
1) The cost of obtaining top quality videos had been going up (and is higher than ever before today) for the HUSNG market. HUSNGs are one of the few game types that has actually grown throughout a tough worldwide poker environment (countries like the USA restricting poker, countries outside the USA blocking off from the world player pool), so the players that are playing HUSNGs are making really good money today and it costs more to get good content from them. This means we have to pay more, which means we have to charge more. The value of good content is higher though, as you can make really good money in HUSNGs, a lot more today than before relative to the rest of the poker economy.
2) With people wanting to play (and wanting content for) hypers, turbos, regular speeds and heads up cash today (and mental game improvement), it means we have a lot of areas that we need to cover. It doesn't really mesh well with a subscription based system.
3) Poker players are very motivated one month, very unmotivated the next. While there are exceptions, this makes a subscription model very difficult. Having to organize 10-20 videos a month from 10-15 authors becomes a nightmare and is a very inefficient use of the site resources given that the subscription model doesn't really fit what our customers want very well.
4) We can now pay authors directly for their value. I'm familiar with just about every video pack sales site, large or small, and I can say that nobody is paying a higher % to authors than we are in the market. Consider the resources we offer authors as well (coaches, content, access to this forum, access to a very popular youtube channel, no better way to find students, etc.), that is something I am very proud of.
To your other points:
- We gave our a free 60+ page high quality ebook after black friday. We certainly weren't looking to nickel and dime anyone.
- The site and market is stronger today than pre black friday.
- Your 9% ROI is very good. Your arguments are advocating that we charge less for content that helps players get to your level.
- I don't believe we've priced ourselves out of the market. It's more expensive in other places to buy HUSNG content. I'm only aware of one coach that sells video packs of a HUSNG quality level outside of our site and those packs cost as high as $475 to buy. Our highest priced pack is $199, and that's the newest video pack for hyper turbos in the world, built by two currently successful coaches and players of hyper turbos using virtually every teaching method in an efficient manner (slides, hand examples, hand reviews, live play vs casual players, live play vs regs, leakfinder and a new 3bet shoving program as examples).
I don't want to be too hard on you because the main thing is that the cost of HUSNG videos has gone up a lot in the last few years, and that is something that may not be obvious if you're not doing a deep thought study on the economics of the game.
I hope this goes a long way towards answering some of your questions and misconceptions of our site, and we're happy to have you as a customer or just a user that wants to take a look at our 300+ free videos (a majority of our free content has been released after black friday), or 60+ page free ebook.