

Ask HN: Would you pay for information? - karsa

delivered by video?<p>I am launching a beta version of a new video product today...<p>This is a Flash video player which allows anyone to charge for information conveyed by video, allowing viewers to watch for a set period of time free, then the video is paused and the viewer is required to pay for unlimited access if they wish to continue!   <p>I would like to demonstrate the concept to you by given you an example of its usage and for this case I would like to introduce a method to help protect a companies online brand from being tarnished. <p>The Example:<p>Online brand reputation management is generally very expensive to accomplish and the technique I am revealing in this video could save a company thousands of pounds.<p>There is a fee of £49 GBP to watch the full video, but the first six minutes are free. It will then pause at 6 minutes and ask for a payment to be made, thereafter I will explain the procedure technically.<p>You can see the product in action here:<p>http://www.brandcurrency.co.uk/<p>It's the large video with the £49 price!<p>SOME BACKGROUND:<p>We are all pioneers in our own fields and each of us often have unique insights to problems and hold information which could have a high value to others, which can also be easily explained in a video.<p>There are many successful entrepreneurs selling informational ebooks, typically they use a company called Clickbank (http://www.clickbank.com/index.html) who manage the online payments of sales. <p>These ebook offers' normally make use of very long and somewhat spammy looking sales pages which for some strange reason seem to convert well... <p>A typical example of such a sales page would be as follows:
http://www.get-better-grades.com/index-pass-exam.php<p>Clickbank claims to have paid out over 1 billion euros in earnings over the last 10 years so clearly there is money to be made from selling information!<p>One problem with those traditional ebook offers is that ebooks actually take a long time to write and develop. <p>Another problem is that in many cases video is better suited to explaining techniques visually, take the example of a plasterer demonstrating the art of plastering! Which would you prefer an ebook or a video demonstration?<p>In my new concept, information can be produced and packaged much quicker than traditional ebooks. Videos can be shoot and edited very quickly (in a few hours) in comparison to ebooks which can take several months to develop. <p>Also by using video it opens up entirely new avenues which can be explained easily and quickly, giving both the producers and consumers of the content added efficiency.  <p>The concept is known and the Flash PAYer and can be found here:
http://www.karsa.co.uk<p>At some point in the next 6 months (according to its adoption) I will probably incorporate a payment plan to this application and most likely have a tiered pricing plan with low monthly fees from £29GBP etc. however, its use is currently free and it will likely stay free for at least 6 months. <p>All payments go straight into the video producers own Paypal account so they make all the profits, no margins are siphoned off.<p>This concept is currently a 'minimum viable product' with just the most essential features incorporated, nevertheless it achieves the goals I set out for this product and I hope you find the concept interesting.<p>It could be used for any archive of online video information and all the variables can be adjusted.<p>I would love your feedback....
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jacquesm
Paying for information is dependent on the value of the information to an
individual or corporation, if you want people to pay for information then you
can look at angles such as scarcity, quality, return on investment,
entertainment value and so on.

There is such a thing as the 'information economy', so clearly information has
value but what that value is highly depends on the information itself.

Next weeks lottery numbers are information, they're worth gold today but
nothing two weeks from now.

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karsa
Don't you feel that with video, the reason it has been traditionally poor at
converting or monetizing is because the systems used so far have generally
been pay walls.

Pay walls eliminate customers because its like anything what you don't know
you don't miss.

This new concept however, works much like real world interactions where the
consumer can get hooked on the content before having to pay.

I think this is a fundamental shift from Pay walls...

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jacquesm
The way most video sites seem to solve this is by adding advertising at the
beginning of the clip.

It's a high nuisance way of creating money but it does seem to work.

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karsa
We have seen many large companies fail who relied solely on ads: Veoh, Stage6,
even Google video failed to make money from ads!

The problem with ads is the cpm is always so low on such content and the
bandwidth so high, it was this problem which led me to develop the general
concept for my own <http://www.documentary-film.net> which was always on the
brink of closure until I implemented this concept.

It worked so well that sales increased over 90% and I was able to afford a
proper CDN (highwinds) to deliver the content.

After this I didn't think more about it until Andrew Warner @ Mixergy
mentioned about charging for his content and I told him that introducing a pay
wall (as he planed) would result in viewings going to zero, instead I told him
to develop something like I had with doc-film-net.

Of course his response was, where's the plug in for that?

That's when I had the aha moment and built it for him and anyone else who is
in the same boat. There's a ton of tech involved to achieve this feature and
its way out of depth for the average content producer.

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michael_dorfman
I can't say I'm too impressed with this as a business model.

I think that it's a small set of cases where video is the most effective way
to transmit valuable information, and the alleged advantage over e-books
("e-books actually take a long time to write and develop") completely
underestimates the work involved in creating a professional video.

But even then, supposing that I were willing to pay £49 for a (professionally
produced, high value content) video, I'd sure as hell want to be able to
download it and watch it repeatedly.

So, at the end of the day, what you are offering is DRM-protected video-- and
there are plenty of much bigger folks (i.e., Hollywood) trying to crack that
nut, with little success so far.

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karsa
offerings so far do not use the get hooked before you buy.

Also the variables are fully adjustable so people can allow 1 year of access
etc..

The video I created as an example took me a few hours which includes the time
needed to make the codecs. Of course though higher quality videos take longer
but still they can be made relatively painlessly today.

Thanks for your feedback though.

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braindead_in
Would you consider selling the audio transcript of the file?

We are working on a similar thing for podcasts. We plan to offer audio player
and an option to buy the full transcript of the podcast. You are not however
forced to buy the transcript; you can listen to it as usual. Transcript is
just a convenience thing if you want to read it instead of listen to it.

~~~
karsa
I would not since this is just really a demo for how the video product can be
used..

good luck with your project though..

