

Ask HN: how would you monetize Learnivore.com ? - thibaut_barrere

I'm looking for useful (for the users) ways to monetize http://learnivore.com (ruby/rails screencasts aggregator I'm running).<p>The goal isn't to make huge loads of money, rather to pay the hosting and a bit of the time I spend maintaining and finding content for the site.<p>I tried various options (pledgie, amazon, affiliation through interesting ebooks) but none really worked out.<p>Would you have any suggestion ?
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techiferous
People part with their money when you add significant value (solve a tough
problem or create lots of delight). The value of Learnivore is that it
collects programming screencasts into one place, which is _valuable_ but not
_that valuable_. It's not creating enough value that you could charge directly
for it.

In order to make good money, you'd have to view the screencast aggregation as
your marketing, not your product. You'd have to invent another product to go
along with this.

Ads are a weak example of this. Ads would be about connecting programmers with
businesses serving programmers, which you can see is a different product than
screencasts.

Another product could be consulting. This site could generate leads for
consulting gigs, which would give you more money in one hour than you can
probably make in a month with ads.

~~~
flog
Well, it's obvious that people are making money off of screencasting. If
you're referring people to them so they can make sales then you should be
taking a cut of that.

Offer a 'featured screencast of the day' which takes prominent place on your
site.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Yup, I'm in touch with javery for this exactly. Thanks!

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malbiniak
(With the IP owners permission...)

Convert the screencasts into a standard format via Hey!Watch or Encoding.com,
make them available for offline content on mobile devices. Charge for that,
give a kickback to the IP owner.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
A couple of people contacted me about that. It would be probably doable for
"free" content, delivered for a low-cost for offline watching via an iphone
app with in-app purchase, then split 50/50 between learnivore and the author.

I would definitely ask IP owners first, just like I did before adding any
content on the site.

Thanks for the suggestion!

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javery
I know I would pay to have some of our screencasts from TekPub.com show up on
the site in some sort of featured section (ideally inline with the rest of the
content but clearly marked as sponsored). Drop me a line and we can work
something out. (email is in profile)

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Will contact you - thanks!

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petervandijck
You attract rails programmers? The obvious monetization strategy there is a
jobs site. Either start one (specific for rails), or link to one that pays
referral fees.

Most likely though, you should probably consider this a labor of love.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
A job site is a good idea too, I didn't thought about that.

This specific site is definitely a labor of love :)

~~~
SingAlong
+1 for the job site suggestion.

Just contact some startup job sites and offer them a deal. Don't go with
freelance project listing sites. Most people know that it's tough competition
on those type of sites.

Link with sites that just serve job listings. ex: startuply and others.

On another note, allow those who make paid screencasts to advertise on your
site. integrate some kind of reddit-type self serve ads that show up on
specific screencast's pages. Would be cool.

ex: I make ActiveRecord screencasts so i choose some pages on your site which
display activerecord screencasts and choose to display my ads only on those
pages :) this way you show related content too :)

~~~
thibaut_barrere
Very nice idea, again. I will investigate both, thank you!

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patio11
Approach the screencast owners about setting up affiliate programs. Since they
have 96% margins or so, it really makes sense for them to pay 20% of the
purchase price to you if you can demonstrably drive converting traffic.

~~~
javery
When you pay your authors your margins are closer to 45%.

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moultano
Become an amazon affiliate and link to highly recommended programming/math
books.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
That's a good idea I believe - I could add a hand-picked book section, where
each book would be an item like the current screencast.. Thanks!

~~~
ydant
Don't get too excited about that idea, if Stackoverflow's experience is
anything to rely on:

[http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/11/our-amazon-
advertising...](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/11/our-amazon-advertising-
experiment/)

However, your experiences might be a bit difference since people going to
watch screencasts are more likely to be looking for a focused instruction than
people going to Stackoverflow, so maybe these people would buy books. It's
worth a try, but I wouldn't invest a lot of effort in it.

They also mention the Adsense problem on technical sites that you refer to
elsewhere in this post.

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thibaut_barrere
Link: <http://learnivore.com>

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mazuhl
You should start making your own screencasts and sell them alongside the
others. Your brand is already established, you'll have seen enough screencasts
to know what works and you can identify gaps in the market. If you put an open
poll on there you can get feedback from people visiting the site about what
they want to buy, but isn't there. And you can share that with other
screencasts producers. If nobody else steps up, you can make and sell the most
popular suggestions.

You don't even have to make the screencasts, you can pay others and you just
sell them.

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bearwithclaws
You need to sell your ads directly to advertisers. 125 x 125 ads on the
sidebar would be a good option for you. Another thing to consider would be
making sticky, sponsored post on the homepage.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
I will think about that. The specific thing about this site is that there is a
lot more people using it via RSS and Twitter than via the site.

I think I could offer ads spot in the RSS for one month in all published
screencasts, for instance.

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mkramlich
if any given screencast you link to does something they charge for, you could
arrange with them to get an affiliate kickback fee

~~~
thibaut_barrere
That would be lovely...

Unfortunately none of the existing publishers on the site run an affiliate
program.

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keefe
why no adsense?

~~~
thibaut_barrere
I never tried on this specific site, but on other sites I found that the click
rate is so low it's not worth it. Maybe I should give it a try though. Thanks
for the suggestion.

~~~
thefahim
Your hosting costs are probably very low. Since you're looking just to cover
expenditures and maybe make a little pocket money, AdSense might suffice.

~~~
thibaut_barrere
I already tried adsense on programming related sites. With a CTR of about
1/10000, I'd likely make 0.5$ per month (plus adsense is not really sexy :-)).

But why not - I'll think about it.

