Today I’m happy to announce the launch of our Plus subscription service for readers looking to get even more out of this great site! In addition I have a few other updates to the site to announce as well as general site news!
As you know we have been selling PSD files for tutorials for some time now at $2.50 a pop. These file sales are being disabled now and replaced by our new Plus subscription service at $9 a month. That means each PSD file comes in at about $.80 which is a much more reasonable amount.
Subscriptions also mean a more consistent revenue stream for the site which is great as it’ll help us build the site up. Because we’re committed to paying very fair rates for regular, guest and community contributors, and also because the site gets *so* much traffic, we actually spend more than eight thousand a month on the site. Needless to say that’s a rather large amount, so plus subscribers will be helping pay for both what we’re already doing and what we’ve got planned!
Members-Only Tutorial & Layer Styles
In addition to the PSD files, you’ll also receive periodic extras with a Plus membership. Currently the two extras that are available are a bunch of layer styles and also a special members-only tutorial. I’m quite proud of this tutorial and think it has a lot of practical application, it’s called How to Photoshop a Product into a Slick 3d Environment and shows you how to place a mobile phone into an advertorial style environment created in Photoshop. You can see the image below:
Learn more / Join
You can read more about the Plus membership including our 100% money back guarantee and more reasons why it’s worth joining on our Join PSDTUTS Plus page.
And A Few Extra Updates
The PSDTUTS Plus system isn’t the only thing we’ve been working on. I’ve also added a “Most Talkative Users” down in the footer to link out to the websites of people who leave the most comments each month. I figure it makes the site a bit more communal and nicely replaces the text link ads (that we’ve ditched now).
Also I’ve started an extra Photoshop Resources section to provide links to useful stuff like other tutorial sites, fonts, stock photo sites, and generally anything relevant. It’s still pretty thin, but I’ll be adding more links in the coming weeks.
Finally I’ve added a new footer to the posts with a live Digg button on every post as well as links to StumbleUpon, Delicious and the usual suspects. If you enjoy a post, please do give us a vote/save on your favorite site, the traffic we receive really helps the site thrive. We’ve been very fortunate to have been on many of the sites in the past. So to everyone who’s ever sent a vote/save this way, thank you!
Did You Notice All the Extra Posts?
For a long time we were only putting up 7 or 8 posts a month. In February that number tripled up to 22 - that’s a lot more tutorials, and thanks to the awesome Sean Hodge, more articles, roundups and inspiration posts!
My aim is to get the site to 7 posts a week, though that’s going to take a bit longer as our February costs were also dramatically larger than previously 
Still we’re on our way to daily updates here!
What’s Next?
So what’s next for PSDTUTS? Well in case you hadn’t noticed, we don’t like standing still, here are a bunch of things we’re working on:
- Those forums I’m always talking about are on their way (Thanks Arik for harassing me about that )
- We’ve got some exciting guest tutorial writers working on posts - including the fabulously talented Nik Ainley himself
- I’m going to be making changes to the “Write a Tutorial” system so that contributors can send in just an image first to see if it’s worth putting in more time for. We’ll also be upping the payout to closer to the regular contributor rate
- I’ll be upgrading the Photoshop Resources section to have a search function, much more content and better organisation
- I’ll also be upgrading the User Link Feed to be a bit more usable - currently you have to click the links twice from RSS. Now that we’ve got close to 200 people subscribed, I should probably fix that (sorry it’s taken a while!)
After that who knows! Video tutorials would be cool, as would a really elite PSDTUTS wallpaper section, and I have some other ideas that I’ll keep secret for now until I get through the current to-do list!
