
This Is Why I Want To Have A Paid, Premium Section Of Mixergy - revorad
http://mixergy.com/feedback-on-charging/
======
maxklein
I know one business well and it unfortunately affects my thought on every
strategy. All the same, let me offer my solution based off what you want mixed
in with my perception on the right price ranges:

\- User arrives on page. The page says - all old interviews are available for
purchase on iTunes for $4.99. There is an app store link

\- There is another little link saying - don't have iTunes? Want access to our
full archive for a year? Want to download the file in multiple formats as well
as the raw live interview file? Want to support mixergy? Purchase an "Archive
membership" card for $99 a year

\- A yellow highlighted text: "But wait, there is a way for you to watch this
interview for free right now. Simply copy and paste this embed code into your
website, blog about it, hit the play button and watch it. You get the free
video, I get some publicity"

~~~
AndrewWarner
Max, these are good suggestions. I'll see if I can implement those after this
is done. I'm willing to try other ideas.

------
patio11
I'm just going to say directly what I've implied previously: if you think $25
is a lot of money, you may be a wonderful snowflake but you're not a wonderful
customer to a business which hopes to provide strategic intelligence to other
businesses. Accordingly, your opinion on the pricing is less than relevant. If
anything, $100 a month is too low because it invites comparisons to thinks
like the NYT instead of comparisons to things like research reports produced
by the big intelligence firms. (e.g. if you want to download ten pages of
executive summary on the current state of credit card usage in the Japanese
consumer market is, I think that will run you about a thousand bucks.)

I used to pay $100 a month for another service which has roughly the same
value proposition (not naming it to avoid shilling), and paid for it in
perpetuity by five words of microcopy it caused me to add to my purchasing
page. Everything after that was gravy. I don't want to imply that five words
doubled my conversions -- nothing close. It is just that a move-the-needle
effect _anywhere_ in a business where all factors are multiplicative achieves
$100 so fast your head will spin. For those of you whose firms could lose my
business in the petty cash drawer, changes so small I'm unable to even
construct tests with sufficient precision to detect them will generate more
than $100 a month.

~~~
kyro
I don't understand. If people do not think that Andrew's product is worth $25
a month, then so be it. This is the nature of product pricing - there will
always be people who you will piss off and who think it's not worth it, and
there are those who will be willing to pay up. The audience you're talking to
pays for many other services, whether it's basecamp, their linode instance,
pingdom, etc, not to mention their internet access.

Quit patronizing people for not wanting to pay for a service. Andrew could've
said he'd charge $100 a month, and you still would've made the same comment.
There's nothing wrong with charging your customers, but when you decide to,
you're setting yourself up for this kind of resistance, and that's ok. It's
how it works.

I love Andrew's work, but at this time, I simply cannot 'waste' $25 on it. I
don't have a steady income and am trying to save.

~~~
bhp
_I don't have a steady income and am trying to save._

This is the case for most college students and entrepreneurs who haven't been
successful yet. These people, including myself, are who mixergy's interviews
might be most valuable to. We know that the interviews are invaluable, but we
don't always have the $$$ to show for it.

~~~
AndrewWarner
Even if you have no money at all, I'm still giving you at least 5 new
interviews per week for free, plus up to 10 of the most popular interview for
free.

Isn't that a lot?

------
iamelgringo
This is Hacker news. And, as much as I hate to say it, if you put up a pay
wall, it's just going to be a matter of time before someone writes a script to
download each video and put up a torrent of it as you release it onto your
site.

We're entrepreneurs, and at the point where some of that information would be
really useful to us, we're usually broke and in need of advice/help. Charging
broke entrepreneurs to access your archive of content seems counter intuitive.

What I would be willing to pay for, however, is having access to a library of
edited 4-5 minute videos. I'd really be willing to pay for those videos if I
could search through or navigate those videos by specific questions and
answers. That's the service that I want, and that would be worth around $10-14
a month to me.

And, as a reference point, I carried a Safari Library subscription for several
years at $45 a month, which allowed me instant access to all of O'Reilly books
library as well as a library of videos. I also pay to rent movies on Amazon at
$2.99 a pop. I pay Rhapsody a $14 month subscription to have access to 1.5
million tracks of music on demand. I also pay Pandora $30 a year to have
pretty good music recommendations streamed to me.

------
AndrewWarner
I imagine I'm going to get ripped again.

But as harsh as the comments about this on HN were this weekend, they were
also helpful.

I think this will show you what I have in mind.

If you don't want to say anything publicly, email me: mail at awarner dot com

~~~
dpcan
Could you just put all the videos on a DVD every 6 months and sell the DVD for
$40?

~~~
patio11
The purpose of this suggestion is to guarantee people who are unwilling to pay
instant access to the best, easiest way to get to the interviews, while giving
the patrons time-delayed access to an inferior way to get to the interviews. I
don't see that working out very well.

~~~
jfarmer
Seems no-risk to me. Put up an order form, play with pricing and DVD contents,
etc.

DVDs are easy to make and you can take orders before shipping. If you only get
10 orders, burn 'em, mail 'em, and shut down the service as a failure.

------
epi0Bauqu
I'm in a very similar situation to Andrew. (We've spoken over email a bunch,
but for the sake of furthering this discussion, I'm just going to make this
public.)

I'm also doing a video interview series, albeit on a smaller scale and even
more niche (on getting traction). I plan on ramping this up significantly over
the next few months, and eventually doing other niches I think will be
valuable to this crowd. I also don't need the money, but I agree with Andrew
that it sets an example and it creates a seriousness in the project (whereas
with a hobby you can get lazy, which I have certainly been).

However, my core motivation (and I think Andrew's as well) is to help aspiring
entrepreneurs. To do that, I think you want as wide an audience as possible on
the videos.

There is an empirical question here that is unanswered: whether a paywall will
actually increase video usage or not. Andrew will be able to answer that
shortly, but I suspect it will not increase usage of the older content.

This is why I've made the decision to keep all interviews online and free.
Instead any monetization will be done by books and/or DVDs. So here's one more
possible trajectory for you:

1) Segment your interviews into sub-niches.

2) Get good transcripts.

3) Add synthesis and commentary around each sub-niche.

4) Sell books/dvds around each sub-niche.

5) Post the full transcript on each video page to get random SEO traffic.

6) Upsell your books/dvds (but not annoyingly).

Yes, I realize a lot of the book value will be on the Web (in both video and
text form). But I think people will still buy your books.

~~~
AndrewWarner
I've always been happy to share my results with you via email Gabriel. Let's
talk in a couple of months on the results of this.

------
jakarta
I still think this is the wrong approach.

Interviews are tough to monetize because the benefits are pretty intangible.

The Charlie Rose model is better I think. Where you do long 1 hr interviews
and get sponsorships to help pay for costs. It depends on growing an audience
but it can work.

Another idea -- what if Andrew was able to put together conferences/events
given the ties he has. He could charge for admission and have a panel of start
up entrepreneurs where he interviews and moderates Q&As between the audience
and entrepreneurs. Conferences are generally pretty profitable and could be
worth exploring.

~~~
colinplamondon
The Charlie Rose model only works when you're interviewing less niche figures.
Rose has on lots of brilliant people, but they tend to be talking about
current events, business, books, literature, art- it's a wide variety, and
that helps build a broad audience.

Mixergy's about successful entrepreneurs. That's niche. That just doesn't have
the potential size to be pushing a large enough volume that sponsorships
matter. To get a larger audience it'd be necessary to expand the subject
matter, and that would dilute the value of the site itself.

A better option might be to interview successful figures about how they became
successful, and expand more outside of tech entrepreneurship. There's been a
couple of interviews like that, and weighting it 1/3 tech, 2/3 successful
figures in other arenas, there's a much larger potential audience.

At the same time, keeping the laser-like focus on the nuts and bolts and
numbers would craft a high-end audience, the kind that advertisers absolutely
love.

------
bhp
Wait, you're going to allow paying members to embed your paywall-protected
videos on other sites to be viewed by non-members for free? If so, could I
just register mixergyfreeinterviews.com and offer your entire archive there?

The free-embed idea is definitely risky, but it might help if you require
there to be a certain amount of unique text/editorial surrounding the embedded
video in order to avoid abuse. Otherwise, I'm going out right now to register
that domain.

~~~
mdolon
Well, if he's allowing you to download the videos as well what's to stop you
from uploading them to YouTube?

I agree with you though, he should definitely limit access to maintain
control, especially for the sake of his bandwidth expenses.

~~~
middus
The fact that he does not have the right to upload them to YouTube!?

------
jackowayed
With the transcripts free, is there really that much incentive to pay you
money? I know there are advantages to them being available (getting search
traffic to your site, for example), but it seems like it would only be for an
extraordinary interview that I would be willing to pay a significant amount of
money to watch rather than read.

Also, if embedding makes it free forever, what's to keep me from starting a
"blog" where I just embed each interview the day it comes out and thus have a
free archive of all of your interviews?

------
wgj
Andrew:

I've been a Mixergy fan for awhile. I watch what I can, when I can. The
interviews are long, but definitely substantial. In other words, they _should_
be long. Your preparation, the quality of the content, and the selection of
your subjects, are all excellent.

Pay for it?

I haven't decided yet, but probably. I think a lot of other people will as
well. The key is to make the subscription help bridge the gap stated above.
Busy people are making money and will spend some of it to save time and get
straight to the content they need. Bored people are not making money and won't
pay for Mixergy content because they have all the time in the world to look on
torrents or elsewhere.

Your free vs. pay formula:

I believe this current version of it sounds very savvy. You are giving a lot
away, and at exactly the right place, while the premium charge is also mostly
for the right things. By making new content always free, you make it easy for
people to post and discuss in places such as here on HN. By allowing free
embedding on blogs and other sites, you encourage conversation elsewhere. This
is important and you've obviously thought about it.

Bottom line, let busy people pay to save time and attention. Understand that
bored people can't/won't pay, but they may still be loyal fans. Cheers, and
good luck with the changes.

------
netcan
_Reiterating my comment from that page:_

It's good that you wrote this Andrew,

I like that it has some creative thought behind it.

I don't think there is much of a business model in directly selling this kind
of content, but I may be wrong. I'm also a bit suspicious of attempts to
manufacture scarcity, but I am certain there are ways of doing this that are
not wrong. You put at risk all the benefits of Free: long tail traffic (I
think you could be doing a lot better on search, especially video search),
goodwill (or avoiding this strange hate against charging), letting a newcomer
dive into mixergy content, cherry-picking interviews they think they'll like
and becoming a fan.

All that said, I'm glad you are experimenting. You may discover something
really valuabl. As long as you aren't locking yourself into a model, I think
it will be worthwhile either way.

* I suggest considering a serious redesign to support this sort of approach and giving it the best chance. I think you may be bending the blog form a little further then it'll go.

------
rubyrescue
Best line in the post:

...I bet you if I stop charging for it for just 1 week, people would jump on
it for the limited time it's free... Suddenly, old is valuable.

~~~
akkartik
That's the one reason I disagree with. If people aren't looking at your old
stuff it's because they have to put more effort into finding it.

If he offered it for a limited time he'd get a lot more views, but how much of
that is just because of the link in the article that now shows up on the front
page?

Moving to non-free may give you a temporary boost; organizing the archives
would structurally improve page views on old content.

------
volomike
Unless you're providing something pretty substantial and have tremendous
traffic numbers to prove it, paywalls just don't work. Rupert Murdoch is
trying these now and finding out it's not working well. People just won't use
you -- they'll go somewhere else.

Instead, affiliate marketing is the way to go. Try different CPA, PPC, and CPM
ad network arrangements with split-testing to see which ones work best for
your niche, or choose from 2 or all 3 of those types but try different
vendors.

John Chow is a millionaire thanks to his blog, but also thanks to the sales
funnel he gets for people who sign up on his site. I have a buddy in London
who has a PC support forum with ads on it and he's earned $150,000 in ad
revenue alone since 2005. So alternative means to paywalls can be very
lucrative if played well.

I read that Andrew says he's all excited about seeing traffic numbers of
10,000. And I'm thinking, "10,000? That's pathetic. It's a good start, but not
something as proof that I need to build a paywall."

But don't get me wrong -- sometimes paywalls work really well. For instance,
stock investors and daytraders pay for membership sites to get access to daily
stock tips from pros. But the numbers, and the unique-ness of the content,
justify that paywall.

------
briguy
Before making such a drastic change, perhaps you can test your concept
(increasing viewer-ship by decreasing the alloted time to view a show) by
implementing a TV/Cable model. Have a Regular time period that you air a new
show (perhaps for 3 days). Then put the video into "Reruns". If you go to
Mixergy.com, you will only have the Last 3 new shows + 3 random re-runs. This
will bring old videos to the forefront again and will limit your supply which
might increase the demand as people would be worried that they would not see a
show until it happened to come back into re-runs. Also, would have people
coming back to look what is being re-run that day in the hopes of finding an
old classic. Then you can have the All Paid Access that give you access to
full archives. However non-paid users can still get lucky and see their
favorites in re-runs, however would be motivated to watch new shows before
they go away.

------
dannyr
It looks like Andrew's motivation is to drive more traffic to his site.

It's like a having a "sale" every week by making new interviews free.

By putting older content behind a paywall, he's going to drive more traffic to
his latest interviews since people would want to get them for free.

I actually like it and I hope it works.

~~~
KWD
I actually think he will see less traffic, as the desire of someone to link to
information behind a paywall will be a lot less.

------
kitcar
IMHO a better model is to actually offer something of value to your paying
members, rather than than trying to create artificial scarcity. For example,
paid membership gives you live access to influence the interview, by selecting
/ voting on some of the questions which will be asked (slashdot style?)

~~~
pheon
this is a great point. providing a premium membership that allows your members
to ask the interviewers direct and interesting questions. guessing your price
point for that could be fairly high.

------
akikuchi
I'm a fan of Mixergy interviews, but only occasionally check what's new- the
incentive is not there when I'm not consciously planning on spending an hour.
This model will make me more likely to check the site more often. The
analytics will give a better picture (and I'm sure many of us would be very
interested in seeing how traffic changes if Andrew would like to share that
down the road), but count me as one user whose behavior will be influenced by
this change.

I'm doubtful that I'll end up as a paid subscriber, but my sense is that
subscriber revenue is relatively less important compared to the potentially
powerful effect of creating the sense of urgency among users.

------
yosho
Hi Andrew, I really enjoy a lot of what you do, however, I think you should
offer additional value for paying customers besides just the old archives.

Maybe do special premium interviews just for paying customers, or write a
startup e-book, or get rid of all ads etc.

Also, one of my issues with the interviews is that they're all really really
long. I don't have a lot of time in the day, and sitting through an hour+
interview can be hard. I'd suggest mixing up the lengths of interviews and
maybe doing short quick interviews where the responder can only respond with
one sentence or word.

Anyway keep up the good work.

------
askar
I normally listen to your wonderful work pretty much whenever I can have my
headphone on. These days my iPhone carries more of your interviews than any
music. You are doing a fantastic job Andrew, no doubt about that. I think $25
is reasonable to me but can't vouch for others. I would think may be arriving
at a middle price point would certainly make the cut.

As others here pointed out, I'm not sure if it's fair to charge all of a
sudden without the interviewees knowing about it. And I'm not sure if the
quality of your interview would ever change just to keep the paying audience
happy!

------
fjabre
Donations might be a better way to make a little side cash.

It's a very slippery slope when you get into charging for media content..

I would say using Mixergy as a springboard into something else, like a
product, as Joel used his blog as a springboard for Fogbugz.

You also have a great setup for doing promotional stuff but obviously you need
massive numbers to make any real money that way.

Best of luck in any case.

~~~
andrewtj
Andrew's primary motivation isn't making cash. I don't see the connection
between charging for media and a "slippery slope" - what are you referring to?
If anything, isn't it better that he charge since then he's unlikely to need
advertisers which would then make him more impartial when conducting
interviews?

~~~
KWD
First reason under "Why I want to Charge" is "I want to earn money".

~~~
andrewtj
If you read all the way through you'll note that he sees money as a form of
validation. Hence money is not his primary motivation, but rather a method for
substantiating his value.

------
SirWart
I really like the idea of adding additional value to the archive. Right now
it's just a really long alphabetical list, but it would seem more valuable if
it was categorized by the type of advice/information in each interview so you
could listen to them in the order you felt was relevant to you. The idea of an
unorganized archive just feels low value to me, which is the opposite of what
I consider most of your content.

------
omarchowdhury
I'll pay. I enjoy the Mixergy interviews and I always find insight from
hearing about other people's business that I translate into my own work.

------
samh
I think you provide a lot of value and have every right to charge for it.

I would think about the option of all videos being free forever but a monthly
subscription to access a Mixergy forum, a members area, where people discuss
the interviews and talk about the issues they raise.

Use the interviews to create a high quality community that people are willing
to pay to join.

------
mdolon
In all honesty, while I value your interviews tremendously, I would not pay
for them if the transcripts were readily available.

Is video advertising not worthwhile for the amount of traffic you get? That
would be fairly painless for all parties involved and definitely fine to most
users, as we have to deal with it on YouTube and almost all news outlets.

------
llimllib
> My idea is different from what others have done

It's not entirely new, of course. I call it the "This American Life" model.

------
jacoblyles
An alternative would be to charge for the new stuff and release the old stuff
for free. This carries a different set of incentives with it. I think people
would be more likely to pay for new stuff, and this would leave a greater body
of links to be rediscovered on social news sites and blogs.

------
jakecarpenter
I think you should definitely give the premium service model a shot. Even if
it doesn't prove to be your final business model, you've already proven that
you know what entrepreneurs want to hear, so maybe you could move into hosting
panels/luncheons or similar.

------
davidmurphy
Not loving this idea....

Keep in mind your target audience may be struggling entrepreneurs who are
broke (like me).

Or perhaps you're targeting the free site for us, and targeting the paid
archive for more well to do folks.

------
DanielBMarkham
I don't know, Andrew. I think there are two questions here. You asked our
opinion, so here goes.

1) What charging model drives the most quality and response from readers?
(This seems to be the crux of the argument from your blog)

2) How do I, as a startup founder, get the most from the internet and how do
you fit into the picture? If I have to pay for material, why would your
material be any better than, say, a few books, free videos, or making friends
with other cofounders on a place like HN?

It very well may be that you had 6,900 viewers of the PG interview, but here's
the dirty little secret nobody talks about enough over here: there's about 500
tire-kicker, wannabe entrepreneurs for every real one. Probably a lot more. So
your "audience" is probably largely consisting of people who like learning as
much as they can without actually doing very much. The get a certain cachet
out of participating in your interviews.

If that's the case, then I say target those people: work towards more and more
famous people and more and more quasi-in-depth interviews. Charge for older
material. Set up a "Gold Ring" Entrepreneurs Circle or some other premium
brand. This puts you in the startup media business, just like book sellers or
the pay-for-feedback guys.

However from my end I think we'll part ways here, at least as far as your paid
service goes. Startups have about a thousand different facets and I need to
know just enough about each of them but not too much. That means I need
instantaneous feedback and a conversation, not an hour-long video from famous
person X on how tough it was ten years ago to make their first million. That
works great for mass media, but I need to know how to roll out a beta of a
social networking site on a limited budget. I need to be able to ask questions
about specifics around this topic and I need to know it within the next couple
of hours. HN gives me that immediate feedback, and as the amount of material
on HN grows, I get all sorts of historical information in easily-searched text
format without having to pay anything at all.

Hope that makes some sense to you.

~~~
gioiam
I believe some of the value that Andrew offers is in the description of his
videos. When I click on an interview I have an idea of what topics are going
to be discussed. If I have certain information that I am looking for one of
the ways I research is by looking at the Mixergy archives. I understand what
you are saying about the value of immediate feedback, however the next best
thing to me are Andrews interviews.

------
friendstock
perhaps subscription model (that affects everyone) is not the right model.
Perhaps you can find something that 1% of your viewership would pay $1000
for... Check out Justin Smith's InsideFacebook which charges for premium
research reports. I think there might be enough VCs, tech research analysts,
etc. who would pay that sort of premium for mixergy to get an inside scoop.

------
sailormoon
_How can you respect what's taught on Mixergy if you see that I'm not bringing
in real revenue? You can't._

I guess PG better start charging for his essays, then! That is, if he wants us
to respect him.

~~~
marciovm123
He does; go to amazon.com and search for paul graham and you'll get a bunch of
premium-consumption options for his work.

~~~
staunch
He's got a _single_ book of some of his essays (Hackers & Painters) for sale.
He doesn't charge you for access to _any_ of the essays on his site (which I
believe is every one he's released). He doesn't even have ads on there.

------
mdg
I mean, the interviews are good and all, but really, it is just a substitute
for white noise so I have something to listen to while working. SO podcast
fills the same void.

