Your biggest fans and long-term readers of your free content are not only more likely to convert to paying than any other audience, they are also more likely to pay for a lot longer. Old-time fan paid membership accounts tend to have fabulous lifetime values.

The new customers who discovered your site more recently, only after your paywall was erected, don’t have that same sort of brand relationship. Although they were impressed enough to convert at your paywall (although not nearly at as high a conversion rate as your older fans) and they’ll keep paying for months, their overall lifetime probably will be significantly lower than that of the old fans.

It’s perfectly normal. Dan’s chart shows an example of a subscription site where the old fans had an average lifetime value of 18 months, whereas the new folks came in at 10 months average. (BTW: 10 months is roughly double the consumer paid content site average according to our research, so it’s still perfectly respectable.)

The lesson is no publisher new to paywalls should run spreadsheet forecasts for 2012 and beyond based on sales and lifetime values of old fans. It’s unrealistic to assume that initial level of success will continue — your numbers will level off after time as a higher and higher percent of your subscriber file is composed of “new” people.

BTW: Our sister publication, Subscription Site Insider is holding a live webinar today at 1pm ET entitled “30 Retention Tips in 60 Minutes” — an instant replay recording will also be available next week. More info here if you’re interested.

Despite this industry-wide trend, roughly 30-60% of online subscription and membership site publishers are not yet actively tracking mobile users. The percent varies depending on which niche you’re in; for example, 28% of dating sites don’t track mobile users actively, while 46% of matchmaking sites neglect this.

By “active tracking” we mean the site’s executives track mobile usage. The fact is, if you have basic Web analytics installed (and who doesn’t), then you can look up mobile stats for your traffic. The problem isn’t with the tracking mechanisms, it’s with management. If you don’t ask for reports and/or you don’t look at these reports regularly, then it doesn’t matter what numbers your analytics program is collecting.

So, now maybe it’s worth asking your Web team to zap you a report on this at least once a month… preferably tracking month-over-month or quarter-over-quarter changes so you can spot when your own site’s mobile users get some of that hockey-stick action going on.

For example, last Friday Private Media Group launched a new softcore membership website Glamazones.com; and, this week lesbian content specialists Girlfriends Films noted for 2011 due in part to “the massive success of our membership site, we exceeded our own expectations.”

Aside from compelling content, what marketing tactic is responsible for this success? Adult sites rely far more heavily on affiliate marketing deals than any other membership site sector we’re aware of. Plus, in the adult world directly competing sites are highly likely to be each other’s affiliates. One common tactic, using overlays and exit pops to promote a competitor’s site to all traffic that bounces off your own site without converting to your own membership offer. This is an idea that could work well for mainstream sites as well… but we don’t know anyone who’s yet to try it.

1. Site sellers failing to do due diligence on the would-be buyer’s operations, cultural “fit” and finances.
2. Sellers who haven’t prepped their internal accounting and legal records properly prior to a sale.
3. Sellers who hide key information from would-be buyers.
4. Sellers who reveal company secrets to buyers before checking with their lawyer about what’s OK to reveal.

Having sold a membership site myself in 2007 and evaluated buying several others since, I can tell you that mistake number two (failure to prep internal records) is the biggest hurdle for small-mid-sized business owners. You’re so busy running your site that you never have time to clean up the paperwork mess.

BTW: How much is your membership or subscription site really worth if you want to sell it to another publisher? Check out our sister site’s special report on site valuations here.

It seems that during the depths of the recession in 2008-2009, the company’s information service was most often an “impulse buy” for credit pros who desperately needed to figure out credit-worthiness in a shifting world. But, as the economy stabilized in 2010, CreditRiskMonitor’s subscription sales slowed….

What to do? The company shifted its marketing messaging and retrained its sales reps to promote a benefit better suited for a stabler-but-still-sucky economy — corporate cost control data. After repositioning, subscription sales began to rise again, and are expected to continue rising.

Great lesson: never assume your site’s unique sales proposition (USP) will remain the same over time. As your market shifts, your USP has to shift as well.

That’s insanely low churn. In fact, we’re not sure how that’s possible unless 100% of “involuntary churn” is backed out of the numbers. (Involuntary churn are credit cards and debit cards that go bad for a wide variety of reasons ranging from credit limits to fraud.) We’d caution anyone modeling these churn numbers that they are not normal….

Several media brands posted pages immediately, including Anderson Cooper 360, Special Report with Brett Baier, and The Muppets.

Is creating and maintaining a branded Google+ page for your subscription site worth the extra work? Possibly. We strongly suspect you’ll get an SEO advantage (but so will everyone else who participates.) Plus, we’ve noticed that the consumers and executives who tend to love Google+ sometimes do so to the exclusion of other social media. So, if you’re on Facebook or LinkedIn alone, then you’re not reaching everyone. And the there’s the population who are nuts for social media who want to follow your brand in every possible channel you’ll let them follow you on….

On the other hand, having to think about who on the marketing team has time to manage yet another social media outreach effort, let alone optimize for it, not to mention figuring out how posts should be *different* from the topics/wording you’re using on other social media (because shovelware and duplicative cross-posts can hurt your results)… well all of that just gives us a headache. Honestly, sometimes more is not better.

But then, it’s Google. Too big to ignore. Here’s the link to the page where you can start your brand’s free Google+ account.

In an unusual spin on typical membership site offers, Blokely offers weekly auto-renew subscriptions as one of its options. We predict this will be a nightmare for the payments processing department. The offer is strongly positioned as £2.50 pounds per week vs £3.95 per month, presumably to push men to a what-the-heck upsell. They’d do better, though, if they offered £3.50 pounds per week vs £3.95 per month, because then the savings are more overt. And, as every subscription marketer knows, really obvious works really well.

The main difference vs Hulu is that all of TumTiki’s premium content sales are run through Amazon.com. We presume Frontier has negotiated a much larger cut of the resulting income than Amazon’s normal 7-8% affiliate commission structure.

One other difference between TumTiki and almost every other major site we know of (not to mention Fortune 500 companies), the site’s ‘about us’ page boasts a “100% U.S.-based workforce.”

Some show highlights:

- Apps may have more impact than a mobile site currently (so if you only have time to develop one or the other, Savage recommends you go for the app). But Apple’s currently so backlogged, it can take up to 90 days to get a developer account set up with them. Get your account now if you’re planning on early 2012 launches.

- iPads may become the B2B device of choice, but mostly in larger companies which have distributed sales and/or service forces. In other words, the intranet platform of the future for staff who work outside a main office. A lot of content is still sold to Intranets (think billions globally.) B2BAnywhere is offering a free app to play with if you have a catalog you’d like to put on iPads for your sales reps.

- Patrick Spain who has a bit of experience in making online content pay (former CEO Hoover’s, former CEO HighBeam Research, and Exec Chairman of Newser) is jumping into the health content world with his launch First Stop Health. We’re excited about this – and not just because of the inevitable mobile component – because paid health content is one of the few content categories that never really made the leap from print to Web. (The ad cash tsunami from big pharmas erased out paid content models aside from ConsumerReports’ launch last year.)

Patrick’s idea – some free content at the wide end of the funnel and then get readers to upgrade for ‘concierge-style’ health advice.

We love this, not only because consumers deserve non-sponsored health content, but also because this model might have legs for other content niches.