
I wonder if this will work - Roger Ebert on website monetization. - mds
http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/03/i_wonder_if_this_will_work.html
======
mechanical_fish
_Through March, we'll have a special introductory rate of $4.99 for a year's
membership. After April 1, the price will shoot up to $5._

The humor value of this sentence sells itself.

~~~
philwelch
I once paid Slashdot $5 just so I could have access to all of _my_ old
comments. In retrospect, taking my own content hostage is one of the few
effective ways to get money out of me.

~~~
wallflower
I would pay to download all of my saved links from Hacker News so that I could
dump them in a searchable database.

There are so many times I remember seeing something relevant on HN (and
sometimes <http://searchyc.com> doesn't work 'You broke the server').

I haven't examined the Arc source code to see if saved links ages old links
out of the db automatically.

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mattmaroon
Took me a minute to realize he meant paywall when he said firewall. But yeah,
I'm not sure I see a paywall working for him.

If I were him, my first attempt to monetize would be a Netflix affiliate
program.

~~~
ewjordan
I see that he is including Amazon affiliate ads on the review pages; I assume
that must not be working very well for him, which surprises me a bit, as I
rent movies all the time through Amazon (it's one of a very small handful of
places I actually shell out money for entertainment on the web). You'd think
the most famous movie reviewer of all time would have pretty good results with
movie referrals...

I wonder whether part of that might not be the placement and format of the
ads? At least for movies with online rentals and purchases available, I'd
think that a plain old hypertext "Watch [insert movie name] online at Amazon"
link right at the end of the review with his affiliate code embedded would
probably perform pretty well, as opposed to a clearly separated block style ad
up near the top that only links to the DVD purchase page.

He could at least have both...I can't for the life of me understand why you
_wouldn't_ have an ad right at the end of the review, where people are most
likely to be moving on to another page rather than sticking around and reading
more...

~~~
brandnewlow
You rent movies all the time through Amazon, but do you do it from Ebert's
page? No, you go straight there and do your thing.

This is why CPA ads and affiliate links are a bad deal for content sites. You
come there to read stuff, not buy stuff. When you want to buy something, you
search for it directly.

~~~
ewjordan
You're right, I never rent from Ebert's page, but that's mainly because I
don't read Ebert's page. If I did, and I saw a review of something that looked
like I liked it, I'd be fairly likely to click a link to the Amazon rental
page if it was visible in the right place, because it would save me a few
clicks and searches. Of course, that's irrelevant, because he _doesn't_ have
links to the rentals on his page, he has links to the DVDs, and they're not
even in view anymore once you've read to the bottom his review. So it's almost
exactly as much effort to go through his affiliate link as it would be to
search for the movie myself.

If I had to guess, placement alone cuts his revenue from that source by at
least a factor of 2 or 3, possibly even a factor of 10 or more.

And Ebert's site is not a content site, it's a review site (a highly respected
one, at that). Review sites usually do very well at driving sales compared to
other types of sites. That's the main reason there _are_ review sites for all
sorts of products on the web. You most certainly do not go to Ebert's site
just to read articles on their own merits, you go to find out which movies are
worth watching. If he thinks a movie is worth watching, I'd imagine that makes
a lot of people watch that movie fairly soon after reading his review, so if
that's not converting into sales he's probably got some part of his affiliate
strategy wrong in a very bad way.

------
fbailey
Affiliate programms for Netflix and Amazon, highly targeted to the actual
movies, add local Coupon Ad Systems from cinemas (I know they don't existyet),
now double the traffic with some SEO optimization (nothing bad, just better
cross linking on the site), get higher conversion rates to regular users by
integrating email supscriptions at the end of every article... target the
email newsletter by city.... ad local cinema advertisement by a small self
service ad system ...

I think it's quite possible to make substantial amounts of money with Roger
Eberts site.

~~~
jasonlbaptiste
Someone needs to set up an affiliate type program for local businesses.

~~~
tk999
I love to discuss about how to setup affiliate type program for local
business. One of the problem is payment tracking. I am trying to come up a
solution. Love to talk about it...

~~~
tbgvi
I've thought about this a lot as well, its a tougher problem to crack than
meets the eye. I started working on something like this that I ended up
scrapping to solve the payment tracking part first. That is also a really
tough problem :)

------
jonas_b
An idea on content micro-payments that just came into my head:

Let's say that you are a user that wants to contribute $10/mo for all the good
blogs and content that you consumer online. You go to paymentstartup.com which
puts a cookie in your browser. All content providers that wants money from
paymentstartup.com users will add a tracker to their website that will report
to paymentstartup.com whenever somebody has visited their blog ir whatever.
Then, by the end of the month, you might have visited 50 blogs so
paymentstartup.com splits your contribution among these sites using some smart
algorithm.

What do you think?

~~~
matt1
I believe that's what <http://www.kachingle.com/> is trying to do.

~~~
tbgvi
I think that's the idea behind <http://www.flattr.com> as well

------
Sukotto
Everytime I hear the term "micropayments" I think of the penny arcade comic:
<http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/6/22/>

------
niels_olson
An allergist I know told me that the New England Journal of Medicine once
offered a lifetime subscription for $500. For context, the annual price right
now $159. Among medical journals, that's _cheap_. $500 for a lifetime
subscription would be unfathomable. Only problem was that in the mid 1980s,
medical residents just didn't have $500 to cough up (well, about 75% of their
parents might have, but that's another story).

------
retro
His talk about micropayments makes me wonder why it hasn't come further than
it has in all the years since it was first talked about. He mentions Google
Checkout as a possible provider. But I would guess Paypal and Amazon's payment
solutions have a bigger foothold. Anyone know of any widely used
"micropayment" solutions?

~~~
steveklabnik
The failings of µpayments are both social and technical. The transaction costs
still eat up a micropayment on the technical side, and the gap between "free"
and "costs something" in psychology ruins the social side.

Flattr is the most interesting approach to this "problem" yet.

~~~
tszyn
I think the psychological problem isn't as big as it's made out to be. Every
time you turn on the lights or plug in your mobile phone charger, you're
making a micropayment to your power supplier. Yet you use electrical
appliances every day without giving it a second thought. Why? Because you
know, more or less, what your typical usage ends up costing you and you
mentally accept that expense in advance.

~~~
jon_dahl
The bigger problem, I think, is not being able to control costs. I'd rather
pay $12/month for Github than $0.02 per commit, for fear that I'd have a
really productive month and end up with a bill for $200.

------
sparky
Did anyone watch that first Youtube video with the guy talking in a bookstore?
I highly recommend it for entertainment value, but it's hard to tell what the
guy's point is w.r.t. micropayments. Payments are totally orthogonal to where
the thing you are or are not paying for is stored. Also, the "local caches" he
refers to are copies.

