PPV

The letters stand for pay-per-view, and they describe how the money moves rather than what the fan receives. A PPV lands in a private conversation as a message carrying a locked file and a price. Pay and the file opens; ignore it and the message just sits in the thread, showing nothing. The nearest term people confuse it with is the subscription, and the difference is not the amount: a subscription is a recurring fee that opens whatever the creator posts on her account, charged to everybody who has one. A PPV is sold once, to one person, inside a conversation.

How is a PPV different from a subscription?

A subscription buys standing access to a feed; a PPV buys one file, once.

	Subscription	PPV
What the fan pays for	everything posted on the account	a single locked item
How often	recurring, monthly	one payment per item
Where it happens	the profile page	a private message
Who picks the moment	the fan, when he joins	whoever is on the inbox

That last row is why the two kinds of revenue behave differently. Subscription income depends on how many people renew. PPV income depends on decisions taken inside conversations, one at a time, by whoever is on shift.

What gets sold as a PPV?

Three families, and the label covers all of them, because PPV describes how the thing is sold, not what is in it.

• Catalogue pieces. Photos or videos already shot, offered to different fans over months.
• Bundles. Several existing pieces at one price, sent as a single locked item.
• Custom content. Shot after a specific request and sold to the person who asked for it.

Whatever sits inside, the fan sees the same two things before paying: a preview and a number. The preview is a teaser, and the words written next to it do more work than the file does.

When should a PPV be sent?

After the conversation has run, not as soon as the file is ready. Our data is unambiguous on two points.

• Sending the PPV before the sixth message drops conversion by roughly a third. The optimum sits after about ten real exchanges.
• The hour the PPV goes out counts. Conversion collapses between 2am and 6am and peaks in the evening.

Neither finding is about the file. Both are about the conversation around it, which is why a strong catalogue sold impatiently underperforms a modest one sold at the right moment.

How do you set the price?

By tier, not by item. Deciding a number per file in the moment produces an account where two fans pay different amounts for the same video and eventually compare notes. A price tier fixes a short ladder, and every offer picks a rung.

Two habits follow from that.

1. Write the ladder down, so it survives a shift change intact.
2. Track what a sale is actually worth on average, rather than what the ladder says it should be. That first number is average order value, and the distance between the two is where discounting hides.

Cutting the price is the easiest lever to reach for and the one that teaches a fan to wait. Moving the send later costs nothing and does more.