Learn About The Web

WPMUDEV white label videos – make sure you read the small print

Onuora Amobi

So we’re always on the lookout for white label instructional videos to offer our students.

For those who don’t know, the term “white label” basically refers to a product manufactured by one company that is legally packaged and resold by other companies under different brand names.

For the online marketing niche, white label products are one of the fastest ways to offer value and content to your customers without developing all the materials and documentation yourself.

Today, we found a white label solution that we thought might have been too good to be true and our instincts were right.

We stumbled on the WordPress Video Tutorials from WPMUDEV.org. WPMU stands for WordPress Multi User (the multi-site version of WordPress) and this organization has been around for a long time.

I’m actually a fan of the company because they have built a pretty impressive business around the WordPress multi-user community.

We saw that the package they were offering seemed to have all the makings of white label gold.

Their marketing language:

Sounds absolutely fantastic! How much does this all cost?

You scroll down past all the marketing for the site and when you get to the bottom and you see the call to action.

All this for $39.60 the first month? Sounds great to me.

Now most people are going to assume from this that the true cost of these videos and it’s a great deal.

Here’s the finely glossed over fine print. Remember that first graphic we looked at? Well they told you it was fully hosted and you “pay nothing”.

That’s not quite accurate.

While you technically “pay nothing” for the hosting, it turns out the setup and implementation of these videos is a little more sticky than the marketing would have you believe.

The Easy Part

Once you pay for the reduced price first month of membership (remember that word), you do get access to all the videos embed scripts.

First you download the embed scripts and you can size and embed that in WordPress wherever you want your WordPress training video to appear.

True to their word, the videos are polished and professional and do deliver the goods.

The Small Print

A “minor” step for installing these videos on your domains is registering each domain. You have to go to your WPMUDEV dashboard and add your domain.

Their text from the dashboard:

Support Videos API

To embed our unbranded support videos into your sites, you must first register their domains here. Otherwise the embed code will return an error message. If you need to embed the videos into an https encrypted page, you must change the urls in the embed code to begin with https:// instead of http:// for them to work.

That’s cool right? Umm not so fast.

While it’s easy to register a domain and have it work, remember that WPMUDEV.org is a membership based site. The next logical question is, what happens if I quit at any point?

Too funny.

We had fun searching for the documentation around this and it was as expected – the small print. We had to search deep for this in their terms of service.

Some of our services such as Anti-Splog, Video or Auto-upgrades require the use of an assigned API key. You may only use your API key on sites that belong to you or those of your clients. You must maintain an active subscription with WPMU DEV to make use of API services.

There it is ladies and gentlemen. Once you embed their videos and get your customers hooked on them, the true annual cost of this service is:

1 month at $39.60 + 11 months at $99/month = $1128.60

I think it’s pretty safe to say that most people would NEVER imagine that they were signing up for over a thousand dollars a year to use a video embed service. To be fair, the $99 a month does include a lot of plugins, scripts and useful WordPress stuff but STILL….

The moral of the story people is, read the fine print before you buy or subscribe.

I’d love to hear your stories about internet pricing and the perils therein. As always, use the comments below.