The global membership market size is expected to reach US $1.5 trillion by 2025 while growing at a CAGR of 18% from its benchmark of US $650 billion in 2020. While the growth of the membership industry has become more prominent over the past years, the market expansion has started since quite a long time back.
For instance, the global membership economy grew by more than 6 times during 2012 to 2020, which is more than 435%! It is evident that the potential of this sector is endless, and this is why the businesses in this field have been growing exponentially since the past decade!
In this blog, we will walk you through all you need to know about membership sites, video membership sites and how to build and grow your own. So, let’s get started!
A membership site refers to a gated site that offers members-only content that is only accessible by the members of that site. Generally, the members of a membership site can get access to the exclusive content/resources by taking a monthly/annual subscription.
Based on the membership plans and membership site type, the members can avail various content and facilities, they can upgrade their membership plan or opt for the bundle membership plan or pause or cancel them as per their conveniences.
No matter in which industry you are operating in, you can always build your own branded membership site. There are different types of membership sites and based on your preferences, you can launch one.
Read our blog on Things to Know Before Building a Membership Site to have a clear understanding on this. However, in this blog, we are mainly going to focus on video membership sites owing to their exponentially increasing potential.
Did you know, 98% of the Americans subscribe to at least one video streaming membership service, while 75% of the Americans subscribe to two or more video streaming membership services?
To give you another estimation, Netflix is the biggest video membership site globally with 222 million subscribers as of the third quarter in 2021. Intriguing, isn’t it?
So, what exactly is a video membership site?
A video membership site refers to a membership site with exclusive video content for its members. The videos can be of different types, genres, and lengths such as movies, shows, series, educational, training, tutorials, informational, and others and generally there are multiple subscription plans for the users to choose from – monthly, annual, bi-annual, bundle plans, and others.
The members can get access to the gated video content based on the chosen membership, they can also get access to the gated membership community to discuss, take help or share relevant thoughts as offered by the video membership site.
Here’s a glimpse of the growing membership counts for some of the popular video membership sites around the globe –
Video Membership/Subscription Site | Members/Subscribers Count |
Amazon Prime | 200 million |
Netflix | 223 million |
Hulu | Over 45 million |
Disney+ | Over 164 million |
Udemy | Over 40 million |
Coursera | Over 92 million |
Skillshare | Nearly 24 Million |
These figures just give a glimpse of the growing opportunities that you can leverage by building your own video membership site. Also, you can explore higher growth scope by offering bundle plans to your subscribers. For instance, the number of combined subscribers for Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN+ surpassed 235 million in 2022!
The above examples are from the entertainment and elearning sectors. There are a lot of other different types of video membership sites in various sectors that are growing in number each year such as –
Video Membership Site | Sector/Industry/Type |
Kesler Science | EdTech |
Lasater.Yoga | Fitness |
Samurai Carpenter | Carpentry |
BizChix.com | Business Training |
Olive Knits | Knitting Tutorials |
Scott’s Bass Lessons | Bass Tutorials |
uBloom | Instructional Videos for Flower Arranging |
Reflexion Yoga | Online Yoga Classes |
Pencil Kings | Artist Training |
It is not necessary that you have to launch a dedicated video membership business, but you can launch a video membership site even as an addition to your existing business in any field.
There are unlimited advantages of creating a video membership site. Let’s have a look.
By launching your own branded video membership site, you can offer your target audience with exclusive gated videos that are relevant to your business/industry/expertise.
By offering such gated video content, not only can you target a specific audience base who are interested in a specific domain, but can also build domain expertise to gain the upper hand in your field of operation.
Building a video membership site helps you improve your user engagement and retention rate significantly. As revealed in a recent statistics, more than 92% of the global internet users watch online videos every week, while videos are considered to be the number 1 source of information for more than 65% of the people!
By launching your own branded video membership site, you can improve the user engagement as well as retention rate for your existing business significantly.
Another key advantage of building a video membership site is, you can build and grow a community which in turn will cater to your business promotion, brand awareness, and overall growth.
Statistics say that 76% of the online internet users participate in an online community, while having your online community can increase your customer engagement by up to 21%. And that’s not it, 66% of the branded communities claimed that it has increased their customer retention rate significantly!
No wonder that building your own membership site and community can help you in all these areas to take your business to a whole new level.
Undoubtedly, having a membership site for your customers convey them a greater sense of security and authentication. As they get to explore gated video content in a secure and exclusive way, this increases their trust and loyalty factors by manyfold.
This in turn helps increase average customer lifecycle value, drives word-of-mouth promotion and builds a stronger brand identity to your audience.
Building your own branded video membership site helps your business earn higher revenue through a broad range of subscription plans that is offered to your customers. As this gives a lot of options to your audience based on their requirements, budget, and other factors, the sales from various membership plans cater to your overall business revenue.
Now that you have a better understanding of what a video membership site is and why you should create one, let’s delve deeper into how to create a video membership site.
It is recommended to plan well and do proper research before you actually start building and launching your membership site. Let’s have a look!
The very first step to launch a video membership site or create a video streaming website is to identify your niche. If you are completely into the video streaming business, then it’s easier for you to chalk out the plan.
Based on your expertise/resources available, you can choose your niche such as entertainment, lifestyle, business, DIY, educational, marketing, and others.
Creating unique content is one of the most important and effective ways to become successful in building an impactful video membership site. Always do a thorough competitor research to have a clear idea of what type of content they are creating, how is the audience response, what type of content in that specific niche is available in the market, what are the audience pain points/ requirements that are yet to be fulfilled etc.
Based on your research, plan your content topics, ideas, outlines and categories. Check whether you have enough expertise/resources to create such content. If not, you can plan to hire additional experts/professionals/ opt for additional resources.
You need to map your membership site content to the exact audience base that you will be targeting. Their demographics, purchase patterns, key requirements, priorities – you need to analyze all of them to ensure that your target audience has been identified and your business is mapped to it.
Now comes the crucial stage of creating a video membership site business model that will take into account all the business perspectives. You need to create a complete profit-making plan for your business including the key products/solutions of your business (in this case your video content), the main target market, target market share (global/ region wise), market value capturing and revenue making strategies, and others.
You must take a market-driven approach to create an effective business model and it is recommended to keep your business model flexible to pace with the dynamic market and its trends.
Once you are done with the above steps, now it’s time to build and launch your membership site and for that you will need a membership site building platform. However, there are other ways to. Let’s have a look!
Building your membership site from scratch requires you to be an expert in all the technical areas, also you need to handle all the maintenance, upgrade or technical troubleshooting entirely on your own in the long run. Unless you have real-time experience in the same, there are high chances that you will end up wasting your time and resources for nothing.
Hiring a developer can be your choice if you have enough time and budget. However, the one big disadvantage here is that you will not be getting any technical support in the long run. Also, there are a lot of things like testing, technical glitches fixing etc. which may cause additional overheads. Hiring a development agency, on the other hand, will cost you more and also you need to go through the processes like SRS document creation, contract agreement, and others.
Most of the successful video membership sites are built on video membership platforms, and you can go for this without a doubt. The only catch is to find a quality video membership platform like Muvi One that comes with a range of competitive solutions and requires no coding from your side!
All you need to do is sign up and follow a few simple steps. You don’t even need to be a tech expert to understand/manage it. In the next section, we will take you through the top features/ solutions offered by Muvi One to help you understand why Muvi One is one of its kind of platforms for building your video membership site.
Muvi One offers a compact solution for user management that lets you manage your user accounts, membership plans, their access rights, and others easily. Be it sending password reset requests to users as and when needed, modify/upgrade their subscription plans, or restricting certain user access, you can do it all by just logging in to Muvi One dashboard and through a few button clicks.
Managing the videos on your membership site is a crucial and daily activity that you need to execute, and Muvi One’s simple video management solution helps you perform every task with ease and accuracy.
Segregating your videos, storing, modifying/accessing them through video library, managing their access permissions and other settings, applying filters or searching – these all you can execute just through a few simple steps as and when needed.
Muvi One offers a wide variety of options when it comes to setting up your monetization models. Subscription-based, ad-based, PPV (pay per view), or hybrid monetization model – you can set them up as per your convenience, business requirements, and audience preferences. You can update or modify them as well whenever you want.
Another significant feature of Muvi One is automated billing management. Starting from automating payment cycles for all your customers to handling delayed/missed payments, or generating timely invoices – it handles everything without needing you to go through any manual process.
With Muvi One, you don’t need to worry about any security threats, unauthorized access or sharing of your videos. It is equipped with multi-DRM (Digital Rights Management) security, dynamic watermarking, PCI compliant payment solution, geo-blocking and VPN detection to safeguard your video membership site from any possible security threats.
Muvi One comes with an analytics & reports feature that provides you with a 360 degree view of the performance of your video membership site. You can get an in-depth insight of the KPIs like average watchtime, peak hours, bounce rate and others and can optimize them further by taking the right actions at the right time.
Muvi One’s global infrastructure helps your deliver lag-free seamless video streaming experience to all your global audience irrespective of their locations, devices/platforms used. Not only does it help improve your customer experience, but also lets you scale up your business without any difficulties.
No matter in which industry you are operating in or what type of video membership site you are going to build, Muvi One ensures that its features and solutions fit your requirements perfectly. Starting from elearning to ecommerce, it offers a complete industry-specific solution to build your video membership site.
With Muvi One you can launch your own branded membership website as well as mobile application. This in turn helps you target even a broader audience base who uses various devices like laptops, smart mobiles, tabs and others.
If you are still wondering how to start, take a 14-day free trial today (no credit card required). And if you like it, we will set it up for you!
You must build your own branded video membership site to achieve better audience engagement, improved retention rate and higher revenue.
The best way to build a video membership site is to opt for a top-notch video membership site platform provider. Ensure that it offers all the required solutions and lets you build your own branded video membership site.
Some of the must-have features in a video membership site platform provider are video management, user management, multiple monetization models, and global infrastructure, to name a few.
Yes, starting from elearning to SaaS – a video membership site is always beneficial for your business.
Written by: Ishita Banik
Ishita is a Content Writer with Muvi Marketing Team. Apart from business writing, she is also an acclaimed author of three best seller romantic thriller novels. In 2020, she got featured in The Hindustan Times, a leading news portal as an inspirational Indian author.
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