Humble Ebook Bundle Breaks $1 Million; All The Authors Should Be Best Sellers
from the if-they-counted-properly dept
We've been talking about the first Humble eBook Bundle, which launched recently, and has taken off really successfully. Over the weekend, it zoomed past $1 million in money raised. As author John Scalzi (whose book Old Man's War is included in the bundle) noted, if Humble Bundle purchases were counted by the NY Times every one of the authors would be on the best seller list. Think about that for a second.More than 70,000 people have bought these books in just two weeks, and the folks at Humble Bundle passed along the news that the current average price of $13.94 (which keeps on rising, as people pay over the average to unlock all the extras) far surpasses all of their previous bundles. And yet, people keep telling us that there are no business models that work and that people won't pay for stuff when they can get it for free? When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?
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Filed Under: best sellers, ebooks, humble bundle, sales
Companies: humble bundle
Reader Comments
The First Word
“Ah, I love this. I love it when people make comments like this, exposing the fact that they've never donated to the Humble Bundle, and therefore probably don't have a charitable bone in their body.
Let me explain it slowly, and I'll try to use small words:
Every Humble Bundle offers a DRM-free, completely unsecured torrent file for every product that is in the bundle.
Every. Humble. Bundle
Every. Product.
DRM Free.
BitTorrent.
No login required.
So all it takes is ONE person to pay $0.01, and share the torrent file, and we can all download the books/software/music files/whatever for free! Forever! And one person to pay above average, and share the associated torrents for those files.
And yet they pull in over a million dollars.
And yet the average donation keeps going up.
Longtime Humble Bundle fans will remember that during the first Humble Bundle, the organizers actually addressed "piracy". They pointed out that many of the people "pirating" the stuff were in fact UNABLE to pay for the bundle due to silly restrictions based on their country of origin, or limited by their financial circumstances ($14 is more than many people make in a week in much of the world), nevermind those who just didn't feel like paying. With this in mind, they took no steps to try and prevent "unauthorized" downloads. All they asked is that if you WERE going to download the stuff without paying, to please use the conveniently provided torrents and save them the bandwidth bills.
And they still cleared a million dollars. On DRM-free eBooks.
Yeah, go ahead publishers. Keep pricing your eBooks at $10, to keep from "devaluing" your product. The rest of us will be over here, selling night-infinite amounts of product at a pittance and rolling around in our piles of money...
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Free stuff!
When the one's insisting that it is true start paying for the stuff they are downloading for free.
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Re: Free stuff!
want to borrow some duct tape?
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Re: Re: Free stuff!
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Says who?!? Currently the number 2 book on the NYT best seller list is "No Easy Day," whose author has said he's donating most of the proceeds to charity. And that happens all the time. Do a search and you'll find plenty of examples of NYT bestsellers donating money to charity.
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It's okay, your world, your rules - NY world, their rules.
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They say, "But the artists didn't do it right!"
I think we can all agree though, artists got paid. Isn't that the important part?
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Of course they didn't.
1) The publishers didn't get a chance to decide whether or not the work should be published.
2) The publishers didn't get a most of the money.
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I suppose that depends on who's bestseller list your talking about. Nonetheless, bestseller lists are generally bullshit, and have always been bullshit, so not getting on them isn't any sort of condemnation.
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I dont think there really are that many people saying that, can you direct us to "people" who keep telling you that ?
It is clear, (even to you) that there are as many viable business models as there are products.
$13.94 is what they are paying (on average), how can consumers get all this for free ?? (including the extra's)?
so this is another model (nothing new there), and it is not 'for free'..
who keeps telling you things like what you claim ?? why would you accept that. I think youre just building a strawman argument..
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Re:
The Pirate Bay. Every book here is available there. That is how you can get it for free.
who keeps telling you things like what you claim ?? why would you accept that. I think youre just building a strawman argument..
We have a number of critics in the comments here that frequently tell us that modern business models such as the Humble Bundle will never work. We have plenty of people saying that Kickstarter and other crowdfunding is just a bubble and it will never work for legacy gatekeepers.
The Legacy industries are the primary source of quotes about how only the old way of doing business is viable. Anything else in unsustainable.
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Re: Re: Pirate Bay no longer "free" but being "monetized".
http://www.utorrent.com/features
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Re: Re: Re: Pirate Bay no longer "free" but being "monetized".
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Re: Re: Re: Pirate Bay no longer "free" but being "monetized".
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Pirate Bay no longer "free" but being "monetized".
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Re: Re: Re: Pirate Bay no longer "free" but being "monetized".
Sorry, what? I can't hear you from all the way at the top of that soapbox.
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Re: Re: Re: Pirate Bay no longer "free" but being "monetized".
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Re: Re: Re: Pirate Bay no longer "free" but being "monetized".
You arrived late to the party. They have had magnet links for a long while, and they finished the conversion to "magnet links only" months ago.
"...for which you need a new torrent client."
Most clients support magnet links. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_uri#Features_and_Clients
As for the rest of your rant...I have no clue of what the hell you are talking about. The link you provided points to the uTorrent website...which is a "free" (as in, beer) torrent client...and even has a Linux version...
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Pirate Bay no longer "free" but being "monetized".
From what I've seen, it's starting to make sense.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Pirate Bay no longer "free" but being "monetized".
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Pirate Bay no longer "free" but being "monetized".
Well IT friggen well isn't..
Making sense that is
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Re: Re: Re: Pirate Bay no longer "free" but being "monetized".
Magnet links =/= OMG I HAVE TO PAY FOR A CLIENT NAO.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Pirate Bay no longer "free" but being "monetized".
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Re: Re: Re: Pirate Bay no longer "free" but being "monetized".
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Legitimately free
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Re: Legitimately free
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Re: Re: Re: Legitimately free
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120217/00515617789/eff-condemns-google-circumventin g-safari-privacy-protections.shtml
2) Why use a link when you're stating an opinion? Sure, Mike links to Techdirt all of the time, but that's just to increase his ad revenue. It doesn't make his point any more true.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Legitimately free
Why not try linking an article where someone uses objective analysis to determine that Google is in fact a mouthpiece, instead of using interpretive analysis?
2. "Mike has said the artists should GIVE away their digital content and make money some other way."
How is this stated as an opinion? You talk about it as if it's a fact. If it is your opinion, then say so.
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Yeah, that's just for Mike's benefit. It provides nothing useful to the reader at all, right?
Idiot.
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Re: Legitimately free
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Re: Legitimately free
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Re: Legitimately free
Tell me, do you cry yourself to sleep on a mountain of cash, knowing that nobody will ever respect you?
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Re:
Look in any comment thread about new business models here for at least the last 6-7 years. Look particularly at people using your moniker.
It's one of the default responses whenever it's suggested that people will actually pay for content that's available for nothing - legally or illegally - if they have the proper incentives and ability to do so. It's total crap, but gets repeated despite the growing number of examples and studies that prove it wrong.
"so this is another model (nothing new there), and it is not 'for free'.."
You appear to have completely misunderstood the point. Pirated copies of every single one of those books are available. Some of the books are available for free or are made up of content available for free (Cory Doctorow's books are released under a CC licence, for example, and he has a copy of Pirate Cinema legally available for nothing on his own website).
In other words, the content is available for free. Just because you can't select a $0 price to pay on the Humble Bundle site (though you can choose $0.01), that doesn't mean that Mike's point is suddenly invalid. The point remains the same; if given the correct incentives, people will pay - and pay handsomely - despite there being a free copy available elsewhere. Some won't admit that because it undermines the simplistic "can't compete with free" and other excuses so beloved of those who want to pretend it's still 1996.
Before making accusations yourself, I would take time to learn both the history to which Mike is referring and the actual points being addressed.
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I love how he's taking credit for a super, price-boosing paywall this time. It's as if he thought of this back when he was pushing tip jars and t-shirts.
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Don't quit your day job, bob.
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Plus, the biggest problem with the cable packages is the price you pay for what you're getting, not the choice of channels.
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Forcing people to buy
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Re: Forcing people to buy
This is a good example. The reason why cable packaging is usually criticised is largely down to exclusivity. If you just want channels X, Y and Z, you have to buy a package that gives you a couple of hundred of other channels you're not interested in. HBO has been criticised for this on this site - lots of people want that channel, but are often put off by the fact they have to have another subscription first. Don't want that? Tough, that's the only way it's sold. Therein lies the problem.
This, of course, doesn't apply in any way to the Humble Bundle. With one notable exception, everything in the bundle is available elsewhere, sometimes for free. You're not forced to buy the package to get anything within it. If you only want one or 2 of the books, you can purchase elsewhere. If you don't care about supporting the authors, you can also pirate them. You're not forced to give the bundle guys a penny to get the content, although there's plenty of incentive to do so with the charity and other aspects.
So, while there's a superficial comparison it's not really applicable once you look at the details. But, some people here just take their first assumptions and run with them no matter how illogical and non-factual their ultimate conclusion is.
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The bonuses are compilations of (already freely available) webcomics XKCD, Penny Arcade and SMBC.
Yeah, they might have a few extras, but you won't be losing much.
tl;dr: you are wrong.
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current average price of $13.94 (which keeps on rising, as people pay over the average to unlock all the extras)
No one arbitrarily raised prices. No grand deception boB.
boB, OOTB, and Average Jo(k)e should start their own comedy act. They could be The Three Idiots. A parody of the Three Stooges based around copyright/trademark.
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They did, but it was cancelled from the pilot for being too similar to an existing show, C-span.
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The Humble Bundle folks aren't the ones raising the price. Sorry if that's beyond your capability of understanding.
"I love how he's taking credit"
That damn imaginary Mike keeps at it, huh? Fortunately, that's not the one that exists in real life - the real Mike hasn't written anything of the sort.
"It's as if he thought of this back when he was pushing tip jars and t-shirts."
Ah, other imaginary actions that betray your completely lack of understanding of even the simplest concepts discussed here. Oh well, keep reading, maybe you'll get it one day.
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bob, this is where your idiocy really shines through. There is a HUGE difference between publishers arbitrarily raising prices on goods and the market determining the value of a good.
What the Department of Justice was fighting, was publishers arbitrarily deciding that $15 was the minimum price of an ebook and colluding with each other to enforce that.
What is happening here are customers deciding that this collection is worth $15. Additionally, this is a collection of ebooks for $15 not a single book for $15.
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Ah, I love this. I love it when people make comments like this, exposing the fact that they've never donated to the Humble Bundle, and therefore probably don't have a charitable bone in their body.
Let me explain it slowly, and I'll try to use small words:
Every Humble Bundle offers a DRM-free, completely unsecured torrent file for every product that is in the bundle.
Every. Humble. Bundle
Every. Product.
DRM Free.
BitTorrent.
No login required.
So all it takes is ONE person to pay $0.01, and share the torrent file, and we can all download the books/software/music files/whatever for free! Forever! And one person to pay above average, and share the associated torrents for those files.
And yet they pull in over a million dollars.
And yet the average donation keeps going up.
Longtime Humble Bundle fans will remember that during the first Humble Bundle, the organizers actually addressed "piracy". They pointed out that many of the people "pirating" the stuff were in fact UNABLE to pay for the bundle due to silly restrictions based on their country of origin, or limited by their financial circumstances ($14 is more than many people make in a week in much of the world), nevermind those who just didn't feel like paying. With this in mind, they took no steps to try and prevent "unauthorized" downloads. All they asked is that if you WERE going to download the stuff without paying, to please use the conveniently provided torrents and save them the bandwidth bills.
And they still cleared a million dollars. On DRM-free eBooks.
Yeah, go ahead publishers. Keep pricing your eBooks at $10, to keep from "devaluing" your product. The rest of us will be over here, selling night-infinite amounts of product at a pittance and rolling around in our piles of money...
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For the moment.
A quick look at TPB shows that the current bundle isn't an active torrent anywhere that I can easily see. A few seeders for the old packs (no longer available) but nobody is trading in the books at all, it seems.
Makes you wonder why.
"And yet the average donation keeps going up."
This perhaps tells the whole story. It's not so much a huge public demand for these things, as much as a smaller sub-community of people trying to support the concept and not the actual content. There doesn't appear to be any really widespread demand for the bundle in and of itself, more perhaps the ideal that it represents.
Short term, it's good. Long term, probably not. People will stop standing on their moral high horses about "supporting the bundle" and will just start pirating it. It's an attitude thing - once someone starts pirating it hard, the rest of it is lost.
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In fact for the amount of advertising it HASN'T done this "word of mouth" sales of the EBook Bundle is a marketers wet dream.
Also the public demand for eBook's is NOT that big a market world wide yet either which makes this even a bettter marketing idea. eBook's are still a niche, though admittedly becoming bigger with the advent of Google Play, iTunes and Amazon pushing them more and more.
As for your piracy opinion in the long run, the statistics and other indicators (including basic human psychology) tell a different story.
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Because most of the books are legally available for free anyway? Because the people running the bundles actually understand their market and have left people with a reason to buy the product? Because they're not trying to shut down their own customers with regional restrictions, DRM, restricted formats and other failed concepts?
"There doesn't appear to be any really widespread demand for the bundle in and of itself, more perhaps the ideal that it represents."
I love the fact that your "research" on this topic consists of a quick superficial search on one website, by the way. You really should have a better basis for your claims before you run off on your wild tangents. Did you even search for the individual titles or think to look at other sites, or is confirming your own biases all you need?
"Short term, it's good. Long term, probably not."
...and you base this on what? Your preconceived notions, your deliberate ignoring of every precedent (ranging from a long history of similar things in the physical world to a large number of games bundles on the same model which have generally INCREASED the sales numbers over time). Your need to shoot down every business model that doesn't depend on negative actions toward customers while dodging the reality that some of these models are working very well.
It's sad that your only defence is the trashing of people who are actually selling and buying product, while you support models that are slowly killing themselves through ignorance.
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i still bought it, because it was a chance to give directly to the authors whose work i enjoy. I won't pay a gatekeeper, but a couple bucks for an artist whose work i like? sure.
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DESPISE the idea of the time-warner-disney-etc borg getting ONE penny of mine out of the money i might spend on what an artist has produced...
BUT, The Artist themselves getting the bulk of *whatever* small-medium-large price i pay for their work ? ? ?
ab-so-fucking-lutely ! ! !
and -to me- that is one of the central fallacies in this whole shmear: it AIN'T The Artists (ULTIMATE creators) who get the lion's share of this money, it is the USELESS GATEKEEPERS...
fuck'em all
art guerrilla
aka ann archy
eof
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"We" already did. As for the old-timers yelling at us to get off their lawn, they will continue to grow old & eventually die off in obscurity. "We" have already moved on, in spite of them.
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Hah
There's nothing new here at all-- except, perhaps, the chutzpah to raise prices to celebrate your success.
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Re: Hah
Do you even know what a paywall is?
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Re: Re: Hah
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Re: Re: Re: Hah
And if your "girlfriend" asks for $200 on Friday night, she's not a "whore". No. When you hand over that $200, it's not "payment."
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Hah
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Hah
Considering that all of the books are available from other sources, many of them legally free of charge, yes I will go on believing that. I have complete freedom of choice, and I chose to pay for these books and donate a large chunk to charity at the same time. Only in your imaginary world is this the only way to obtain these books, and the lack of exclusivity means that I'm not required to give them one cent if I don't want to - and can still enjoy the books quite legally.
The childish attempt at a personal attack at the end of that ill-informed rant only cements the fact that you don't have a clue what you're blathering on about most of the time.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Hah
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Just in case bob feels like brushing up on his terminology...
noun
1. a system in which access to all or part of a Web site is restricted to paid subscribers: Some newspapers have put their content behind a paywall.
2. the part of a Web site that can be accessed only by paid subscribers.
The humble bundle would be more tiered pricing I believe, where you pay a little extra to get a little extra, so unless you think something like a fast food place asking if you want to 'super-size' your order for a little extra to be an example of a paywall, this most certainly does not qualify as one.
Or to put it another way: the fact that you have to pay to make a purchase does not a paywall make, that is just a sale.
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Re: Just in case bob feels like brushing up on his terminology...
Face it: this is a cruel system designed to lock away content from the bottom 50% of the world. If you can't pay what the top 50% pays, you don't get the knowledge in the other half of the bundle.
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Re: Re: Just in case bob feels like brushing up on his terminology...
/facepalm
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Re: Re: Just in case bob feels like brushing up on his terminology...
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Re: Re: Just in case bob feels like brushing up on his terminology...
Thank you, Humpty Dumpty.
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Re: Re: Just in case bob feels like brushing up on his terminology...
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/paywall?r=75&src=ref&ch=dic
But yeah, that's totally 'my' definition...
Again, since you seem to be going off of some twilight zone definition of paywall: having to pay for a purchase does not automatically mean it's behind a paywall, it's just a purchase.
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Re: Re: Just in case bob feels like brushing up on his terminology...
I'll PAY you to Bang your head on the WALL until I say stop..
It'll save me doing it every time I have to read one of your ill-concieved fallacious and dubious diatribes of weirdness
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Re: Hah
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Re: Hah
if the user wants the bonus books but doesn't want to pay above the ever increasing average price, he can either pirate them or not get them.
in your world, the pirate option is terrible and new laws need passing, but in the humble world, they see it as a small cost of doing business and are focusing on those that want to pay.
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"When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?"
You seem constantly astonished that niche markets and bundling and loss-leaders, deep discounting -- in short, standard 20th century marketing, works on teh internets! You'd probably be astonished to learn that much of the electricity now powering the Internet comes from 20th century equipment, some of it approaching a century old.
But you've nothing new to advise industry, Mike.
You fill space with these tiny reports, but your Step 2 is still just question marks.
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Re: "When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?"
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Re: "When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?"
I'm not amazed by it at all, nor do I think it's new. I'm saying exactly what you seem to be saying. This is the same thing that's always been done. I agree. I'm just pointing it out to the people who insist that it can't work on the internet.
I've said before, many times, that this is just taking traditional sales and marketing and applying it to the internet.
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Re: Re: "When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?"
Sounds like a patent-worthy set of ideas to me.
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Re: Re: "When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?"
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Re: Re: Re: "When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?"
And if authors sold a bundle of t-shirts alongside the e-books, I dare say it might make more money than the ebooks.
I don't see how the missing out on the opportunity to make more money makes their other plan hooey.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: "When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?"
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?"
Also, you could have found the book bundle on any torrent site, using far less time and energy than you've spent in the comments section just of this article.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?"
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?"
John Scalzi: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Scalzi
Mercedes Lackey: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercedes_Lackey
Kelly Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelly_Link
And so on. You're talking about some of the biggest award winning, and most celebrated authors of science fiction and fantasy as 'low end.' When you haven't a clue is when you spot your loudest.
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Re: Re: Re: "When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?"
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Re: Re: Re: "When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?"
I think I see your trouble. The method you mention has been discussed here and used by some to good effect, but you got stuck on it. Perhaps this method you find particularly distasteful or something, I don't know. Nonetheless, you seem to think that's the sole idea that has been discussed or promoted here, and that Mike has insisted that it's the only valid approach.
Of course, you couldn't be more wrong. As many, including Mike, have repeatedly explained, there are many valid approaches, of which this is only one. For some, this is a great one, for others, it is not. Somehow, in your mind, this has translated to you believing that nobody here thinks people should pay directly for the work, despite this being an obviously mistaken belief.
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Re: Re: "When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?"
Who EXACTLY are those? You state that they exist, I'm not mis-construing, so now I want specific references. Because I've never seem such, and my comments can't be taken as such.
Your schtick here -- pardon me, your basic premise -- is "infinite goods" and how the resulting cheapness SHOULD change much (at least in degree, not really new in kind, products have gotten cheaper for two centuries now), which is all obvious, but who doesn't know about marketing gimmicks or denies that money can be gotten?
By the way, I rarely read comments (and may forget to get back again), just happened back to complain about TPB. In all seriousness, TPB turning into PAID gate-keeper pretty much changes the entire game.
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Re: Re: Re: "When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?"
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Re: Re: Re: "When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?"
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Re: Re: Re: Re: "When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?"
Bob, for the last time: getting people to pay for something is not automatically a paywall. We've never been against people paying. Why you pretend that's the case, I'll never know.
f he wants to dress them up with weirdo payment thresholds that punish the poorer 50% of society,
You really ought to stop saying things that make no sense.
If he wants to embrace the same bundling that he condemns in the cable business, so be it.
From the beginning, I've explained why bundling is a sensible option for new business models. You seem to still be making up crap.
Really, stop it. It makes you look silly.
Let him pretend that these guys are really innovating. Let him pretend that he invented it.
Never claimed I invented any business model at all. Quite the contrary, since the beginning, I've pointed out that there's really nothing new about these business models. I'm just responding to morons who insist that you can't make money off of content online. And only you have built up a total strawman in your head about what I've actually said.
I'm just waiting for his embrace of full-on DRM. It's coming. I know it.
Perhaps strawman Mike...
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: "When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?"
YOU'RE MICHAEL JORDAN!!!
/s
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Re: Re: Re: Re: "When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?"
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Re: Re: Re: "When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?"
They haven't turned into a paid gatekeeper. Or, actually, any gatekeeper.
Not sure where you're getting your info, but as per usual, it's false.
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Re: Re: "When do we finally put those two bogus assumptions to rest?"
It's the old, tried and tested way of doing things.
And yet they say these new models won't work?
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Look at the Money
The default split between authors, charity and Humble Tip is 65% to the authors. If you calculate that out, you get a little over $700,000. If you figure in just the original bunch**, then that is roughly $100,000 for each author.
Even reversing the default split, thus granting the authors 35% of sales, that gives each author nearly $43,000 for two weeks of sales.
Either way you look at it, that is a good chunk of change for two weeks worth of sales and I know of many authors that would kill for those receipts for an entire year. Even legacy published authors.
*This is rough calculations not based on any real data from the Humble Guys. They would probably have a more sophisticated payment process that factors in above and below average sales. They would also know exactly how much went to charity and to the Humble Tip.
**The added authors would only get a portion of the sales after they were added and only for those sales that are over the average.
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Get it for free? Come on. It's not free at all
But this scheme is far from getting it free. If you pay less than average, you don't get many of the books including the books from the best-known and most famous authors.
Notice the trick of tying this to the current average payment. As more people pay more than the average, the average keeps going up. Last week, the average was about $12. Now it's over $14. If an old school publisher were raising prices with increased popularity, you would be squawking about abusive middlemen and things like that.
Face it. This is a very, very clever paywall and the price keeps rising.
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Re: Get it for free? Come on. It's not free at all
I'll give you a hint, rhymes with "The Fire It Hay"
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Re: Re: Get it for free? Come on. It's not free at all
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Re: Get it for free? Come on. It's not free at all
This isn't a two page news article, this is a full on book and holds more value than a news article.
Besides, I don't see NYT giving the option to pay all the money forward to the author or to charity.
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Re: Get it for free? Come on. It's not free at all
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Re: Re: Get it for free? Come on. It's not free at all
It's a paywall. If you don't pay, you don't read the bonus books.
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Re: Re: Re: Get it for free? Come on. It's not free at all
Who is "we"?
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Re: Re: Re: Get it for free? Come on. It's not free at all
but, to answer your question directly: a paywall is a kind of bait-and-switch tactic that websites specifically do. They get their site included as part of a free newsfeed of some sort, such as Google News, but when you click on the story to read it, you can't unless you are a paying customer.
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Re: Re: Re: Get it for free? Come on. It's not free at all
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Re: Re: Re: Get it for free? Come on. It's not free at all
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Re: Get it for free? Come on. It's not free at all
Uh...aren't the bonus books just compilations of online webcomics? That you can already get for free?
I think the bonuses follow the same logic as the ones in the previous Bundles: nice bonuses, but not essential (as in, they are not the meat of the Bundle).
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Re: Re: Get it for free? Come on. It's not free at all
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Re: Re: Re: Get it for free? Come on. It's not free at all
Wow. Do you just hate anything good and positive on principle? I suppose society needs people like that, that question everything, so that we don't just get caught in our echo chamber...
Anyway... Bob, they're DRM free. No one is locked out. If you can't pay the price they're asking, go torrent a copy somewhere. You won't be supporting the writers, or the charities, but nothing is preventing you from getting at the "knowledge in those books".
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Re: Re: Re: Get it for free? Come on. It's not free at all
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Re: Get it for free? Come on. It's not free at all
Still not learned the real definition of that word, have you?
Tell you what - if you can explain how there's a paywall up in front of, say, Cory Doctorow's Pirate Cinema then I'll resist the urge to mock your ignorance again.
"But this scheme is far from getting it free"
Nobody said it was.
"If an old school publisher were raising prices with increased popularity, you would be squawking about abusive middlemen and things like that."
There's at least 2 things completely wrong about this assertion. Let's see if you can work out what they are.
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Re: Re: Get it for free? Come on. It's not free at all
1) There are no black unicornsridingn in a clowncar; and
2) Popular is Gangnam Style - paywalls are not Gangnam Style. They are, however, Decepticon Style.
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Re: Re: Re: Get it for free? Come on. It's not free at all
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Re: Get it for free? Come on. It's not free at all
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when the entertainment industries, their bought politicians and lobbyists finally admit to holding back innovation and progress. in other words, NEVER!!!
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ugh, that made me sound more like a publisher...
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I love threads like this...
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It's About Time..
Thanks for the update. Maybe if I'm really nice I could bundle my (in-progress) novel in there someday.
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So far... never! /:
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But there is a potentially interesting discussion that can be made from fragments within their generally insane spewing.
The fact that some of the titles can only be gotten by paying above the average does raise a question.
Rational commenters here have pointed out that people may decide that those books are not worth the extra to them and pay below average or may choose not to buy at all.
We know that the idea is to create an incentive to pay above the average amount, but the question is, does that actually work or are they actually leaving money on the table from the people who find the average price above their own valuation or just too much for their pockets?
Sure, some of us may pay above the average and feel happy to do so, Wil Wheaton may be happy to spend over 200 bucks and others even more but we have no way of knowing if the potential 1 and 2 dollar payments that don't get made wouldn't outweigh perceived benefit of the above average price point.
The above average price concept is a cute one and isn't as heavy handed as many sales practices but it is still an attempt to, even if mildly, control how customers behave.
So, I guess the question is, would the humble bundle be less successful without it or not?
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I see your point, but at that point it's so trivial as to be virtually meaningless in the big picture. At that level, it's no different from "buy product X and get product Y half price" at a supermarket or "buy 2 get the 3rd free". The consumer makes the decision about what they want, how much to pay and whether they actually want the extra items. In other words, the polar opposite of what's normally criticised (trying to lock things behind actual paywalls, forcing customers to buy all products to get any of them at all, etc.). There'd be something to discuss if there products weren't available elsewhere, but they are...
"We know that the idea is to create an incentive to pay above the average amount, but the question is, does that actually work or are they actually leaving money on the table from the people who find the average price above their own valuation or just too much for their pockets?"
It's a way of generating more revenue, but it's a smaller point to be discussed. If a person does not wish to pay the extra money to get the average price, they're still getting a very good deal. They're just not getting the same deal as if they did pay over the average. If the worst we can honestly discuss is whether someone who doesn't want to part with $15 or less for a collection of 13 books is getting the deal they want, I'm not sure there's a problem.
"So, I guess the question is, would the humble bundle be less successful without it or not?"
Possibly, but again what's the problem? If you don't want to pay above the average, you have a choice of retailers to get the product from, and much of it is free anyway.
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Cool, if that was the discussion in this case, but it ain't. It's whether that way of generating more revenue, does do that or whether it might potentially be reducing revenue by discouraging people who would have paid less than the average from participating at all. It's not something to get all defensive about.
It's another version of the question that we ask of publishers and retailers sticking to a duplicate of the analogue model, who charge real product prices for digital copies and whether they are deluding themselves that they make more money by keeping the price high rather than selling it at what the customer wishes to pay for something that has a marginal value of nothing. The unlocking of content for paying above the average is a much less authoritarian approach, but being authoritarian isn't particularly the problem it's the fact that artificially raising the price may leave money on the table for the creators and publishers.
What this question isn't is some harsh criticism of the scheme. Humble bundles have proven very popular and deservedly so but this is an area of experimentation still and it does no harm to ask if feeling the need to have some way of raising the price, even if organic and generated by the mass of purchasers isn't in part the same thing that everyone thinks initially, that the pay what you want model would be tantamount to a giveaway loss maker without something to prevent people actually only paying what they feel like.
See every troll and also many others or for example
http://www.techdirt.com/blog/casestudies/articles/20121017/01302120727/when-your-pay-what-you-want -experiment-is-too-successful-ways-you-didnt-expect.shtml
Where the initial plan by Larian Studios was predicated on the idea of using the model effectively as a means of advertising rather than generating revenue and then the confusion that arose from people paying more than expected.
Perhaps it's a bit like the question that if DRM was suitably non intrusive that it did not impact on the paying customers experience of using software would it be worth having at all.
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"It's whether that way of generating more revenue, does do that or whether it might potentially be reducing revenue by discouraging people who would have paid less than the average from participating at all."
Again, I'm not sure how you can actually gauge this, and the people put off by the pricing (which, again, is significantly less than eBooks normally retail for) may very well be completely offset by those attracted by the additional content. That again raises another question - which consumer do you actually want to market to? The one who insists on paying so far below the market value of your goods to such a degree that an extra $1 or $2 for extra content will put them off, or the ones who will repeatedly pay more?
But, to me the real counter-argument is the lack of exclusivity. Most of the content is available elsewhere, possibly all by the time I write this. If the pricing at alternative venues is more to the consumer's taste, then they're free to go there instead. Many of the books had been available before the bundle, and all will remain available during and afterwards through a host of retailers. If you don't want to accept the bundle's terms, you can shop around.
That's the real difference - it's the consumer and the market setting the price, not the publishers. The problems with the traditional model are coming in because there's a complete disconnect between how people want to buy products and how publishers are trying to sell them.
"It's another version of the question that we ask of publishers and retailers sticking to a duplicate of the analogue model"
Not really. There are 2 slightly overlapping problems with that situation. First is that they are trying to force a price onto a product whose value does not support it. That is, a physical book has significantly more intrinsic and tangible value (and cost) than a digital one. People will therefore tend to pay less for an eBook than a physical one. Trying to dictate the price based on what they want to charge, rather than what the market will bear, is where they come into difficulty.
The second problem is the restrictive nature of the way they try to enforce their model. If you want a title published by a particular author, you have to buy it according to their publisher's restrictions - regional, pricing, format, retailer and so on. They try to restrict the market so that you buy according to what's best for them. Unfortunately, this is often unacceptable for the reader, and so they decide to go elsewhere (to a competing book/medium or to piracy) rather than accept their rules.
None of this applies to the Humble Bundle. There's no DRM. There's no regional restrictions. There's no pricing restrictions unless you *really* want the additional content, and again that's available elsewhere. Once purchased, you can choose the format and device you wish to read it on, redownload the content and copy between your devices to your heart's content.
Despite a few mild superficial similarities, it really is a totally different approach.
"the pay what you want model would be tantamount to a giveaway loss maker without something to prevent people actually only paying what they feel like"
I disagree, if it's done properly. Part of the reason why these bundles are so successful is because they give people incentives to actually pay. The Humble Bundles have done this with a combination of good titles, combined with the charity aspect and respect given to the consumer (DRM-free, no regional restrictions, etc.). Other have done things differently, but I don't buy this argument any more than the doom and gloom predictions back when NIN and Radiohead started their experiments years ago. That model's been refined and as long as you don't insist on a "give it away and pray" model, I don't see why there's any inherent risk over and above what already exists today. I certainly find it interesting that your example is of a model that worked, only worked in the "wrong" way for that publisher. It's not that it failed, it just didn't get them the results they wanted (although another publisher may well have been very happy with that outcome).
It's certainly better than crippling and devaluing your product, overpricing it and then complaining that pirates are stealing your customers when they decide not to buy from you... I'll maintain that the attempts to fight piracy and refusal to compete have caused more lost sales than any pirated copy ever has.
"Perhaps it's a bit like the question that if DRM was suitably non intrusive that it did not impact on the paying customers experience of using software would it be worth having at all."
That strikes me as a strange question, and something quite different. The main problem with DRM isn't simply that it's intrusive but that is *only* impacts paying customers. Once broken, it will never impact a pirate, thus making it worthless.
DRM has its place in rentals and other non-purchase situations but in purchased goods it only affects the paying customer. That's the reason why it's so problematic. Less intrusive DRM (e.g. Steam) gets less complaints. The problem is, DRM's only purpose is to stop you using the product you've bought in ways that haven't been pre-approved, even if that's just moving your legally purchased goods from one player to another. There's no way to do that unintrusively, the trick is to do it so that the least number of legitimate customers is negatively affected. But it's still worthless while pirates can use unprotected copies - and they always have/will.
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It is at times like this I wish I could write with greater clarity and conciseness.
"I certainly find it interesting that your example is of a model that worked, only worked in the "wrong" way for that publisher. It's not that it failed, it just didn't get them the results they wanted (although another publisher may well have been very happy with that outcome)."
The point was what they said
"we thought that we’d have a lot of sales at the absolute minimum, which basically is 1 cent, and this assumption was actually never challenged."
What I am mostly talking about here is that we have certain ideas that we have internalised without necessarily having considered them all that carefully. In Larian's case they did have that thought that it would effectively be a trade off, giving up profit for greater distribution and awareness.
"which consumer do you actually want to market to? The one who insists on paying so far below the market value of your goods to such a degree that an extra $1 or $2 for extra content will put them off, or the ones who will repeatedly pay more?"
Why for example, do you think that it is an either or scenario there.
I'm not saying you're wrong but has that thought, that "fact" been tested in any way?
You might be right and the numbers be tiny, but that still could be leaving money on the table for the humble bundle.
I doubt that the other extreme would be correct either and so it is perhaps very unlikely that your ideal consumer here would represent say 1% of the potential market.
But it could be somewhere in between.
"But, to me the real counter-argument is the lack of exclusivity."
That's fine for the trollish argument of its a paywall or whatever. But that is not my point, my point is simply that the humble bundle may in itself be able to make more rather than less money without this special extra content for payments over an amount. Or maybe not, I am not saying that this is a fact, simply that it is worth considering.
It is especially worth considering that we all may have this belief that a higher average means more money, when it may be that an average of a dollar but from 7 million people (ok really unlikely but just as a hypothetical play with it) could be more profitable.
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Hey, no problem, I think I do understand the gist of what you're saying.
"we thought that we’d have a lot of sales at the absolute minimum, which basically is 1 cent, and this assumption was actually never challenged."
The way I interpret this is in the same way as even the earliest stories about "pay what you want models" like Radiohead and NIN's, or the idea that you just need to find a few thousand true fans rather than millions of casual ones. That is, there's always going to be freeloaders and cheapskates. Always has been, always will be. The trick is to get the cash off those people who will pay, which is what these models try to do.
"In Larian's case they did have that thought that it would effectively be a trade off, giving up profit for greater distribution and awareness."
Indeed, the results clearly did surprise them. That it went a different way doesn't necessarily mean it's a failure, or even a problem in other hands. It just didn't give them the result they expected, and they decided to re-evaluate where they stand. No problem with that at all.
"Why for example, do you think that it is an either or scenario there."
I don't necessarily think that. But, when you market a product you have to have a target market. If one demographic feels less attracted to a product because of how you position it elsewhere, then so be it. That's business. The problems only come when you try to block areas of the market to try and force greater revenue, but fail miserably - as many of the traditional publishers, RIAA, etc. are doing right now.
"I'm not saying you're wrong but has that thought, that "fact" been tested in any way?"
Don't get me wrong, I'm not an insider and these are still very much experiments. I'm not trying to state facts in any way, just my own opinions from the POV of a consumer who regularly gets screwed over by the more wrong-headed moves of the content industry, but who still pays money where he sees value.
"But it could be somewhere in between."
It most likely is, which is why these are really still experiments and works in progress. However, if you want a "fact", consider that this bundle has been very successful, as have some other similar projects. The only people crowing about losing money to those who won't pay the ideal amount are the legacy players. While there's still potential refinement and "money on the table" to get back, I think the concept and model is sound for the most part.
"It is especially worth considering that we all may have this belief that a higher average means more money, when it may be that an average of a dollar but from 7 million people (ok really unlikely but just as a hypothetical play with it) could be more profitable."
Yep, and there's ways the model can be copied, adjusted, played with in any way to try to leverage that. I'm not saying you're wrong, I just personally think that given that the bundle was not the only way to get these books and that the price was so far below the typical retail price of similar books from major publishers, it may not be the case. Still, that's a question for future fine tuning, not whether this bundle was successful in and of itself.
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There are still successful movies and tv shows and ebooks that charge full retail price equivalent to their hardback or paperback prices.
"there's always going to be freeloaders and cheapskates. Always has been, always will be. The trick is to get the cash off those people who will pay, which is what these models try to do."
The beauty of digital files as I know you know, is that those you refer to as freeloaders or cheapskates bring no actual costs to the publishers/distributors/artists. The supposed cheapskates who might be only willing to part with a dollar are people who would simply be increasing your take by a dollar. The key is how many of them are there and could their dollars and less than dollars still add up to more than the relatively high spending ones who are making the humble bundles successful at the level they are at and who feel that they are getting a bargain at the price they are paying.
My point is that those put off by having to exceed the average price will possibly go elsewhere (as you point out they can) which is to the detriment of the bundle's take. Which, we agree is still successful even if that is the case.
The point I keep trying and apparently failing to make is that we all tend to have these inbuilt suppositions which have their basis and fact in the analogue world where product has real value outside of the creators representation of their ideas and transposing them awkwardly to the digital world where the digital file itself does not have any actual value at all. It is an effectively free delivery mechanism and that is all it is.
"But, when you market a product you have to have a target market. If one demographic feels less attracted to a product because of how you position it elsewhere, then so be it."
The thing here, is that in the online world, the market is surely anyone who would like to read one, some or all of those books and is the perceived need to target those with greater disposable incomes actually the benefit it's believed to be or is it leaving a lot of money from supposed cheapskates in said cheapskates pockets, could what is undoubtedly a success story otherwise be a greater, by orders of magnitude, success if we could throw off our ideas of what we decide is reasonable market value
and that applies whether it's the idea of market value that a lot of publishers have where they price ebooks at the same or greater than paper or even hardback prices or when the humble bundle sort of determines it to be the average price paid.
To me, the first time most people encountered the issue of "piracy" we probably all sort of agreed in principle that if people could have something for nothing then they probably wouldn't pay for that same thing.
We even thought that, in situations where we ourselves would still pay; on that assumption that people tend to have that others are always more venal than they are.
As when doctors, just as an example, always believe that it is "other" doctors who are more likely to be affected by pharmaceutical companies marketing efforts than they believe they themselves are.
Unlike the trolls however, we saw the facts, where certain titles were intensively pirated but seemed to have no impact on the sales and success of those titles as with Avatar or indeed those specific and individual examples where sales were clearly boosted by piracy rather than the negative effects that are supposed to occur.
So, I believe, many of us, who are not of the trollish variety then realised we needed to rethink what initially may have seemed to be simply basic common sense to us.
We learnt as Mike pointed out that in business, claiming not to be able to compete with free is the same as claiming to not be able to compete at all. Things like kickstarter and humble bundles and any one of hundreds of different trials and experiments demonstrated that people were still willing to hand over lots and lots of money in support of people who produced the kinds of thing they want.
We learnt that we ourselves could well find ourselves technically pirating products that we had bought simply to get around the inconvenience of the DRM mechanisms incorporated with our purchases.
We also may have noticed that we would get turned on to a particular product through someone who had themselves pirated that movie or game and noted that we and our friends then ended up paying for something we otherwise would never have come across at all.
We grasped that DRM only affected those who handed their good money over at the level the publishers wanted and had no impact on everyone else and that everyone else was in fact getting the more useful and usable product.
The trolls show no development, they take no facts on board, they have their idea, their "seems like basic common sense" initial thought and seek only to bolster that initial incorrect view by dragging in anything, no matter how out of context, to support it.
Despite this, some of their ramblings do touch on potentially interesting questions, not as they frame them, paying for the humble bundle is not a paywall, but if we remove their nonsense and actually look at what "seems like common sense" notions we have kept unchallenged in ourselves.
None of this is to suggest that the humble bundle and other examples have been anything other than successful, it is simply wondering whether we still have some adjustments to make to this online world where the actual value of the distribution mechanism is effectively zero and where even a dollar might be quite an unneccessarily high valuation to place on any individual item and whether our disdain for 20 cent purchases and cheapskates and freeloaders may be our own troll-like inability to move past a preconceived and invalid notion that we have ported over from the analogue world.
It is hard to say and yes people will keep on experimenting and tweaking and we all know that give it away and pray is not likely to be the best possible solution, but remembering that we do particularly need to keep questioning those certainties that we have but which we simply have by default based primarily on a false analogy between the analogue and online digital world.
That we may be failing less than the copyright maximalists and trolls does not make the questions irrelevant.
There is plenty of fail to go around after all.
Does it make sense to market to only a portion of your potential purchasers?
All in all, we fundamentally agree on many things, including the fact that the humble bundle amongst many others is proof that you can treat customers much much better than they are currently being treated by established industries and make plenty of money, in some cases more than they could hope to make by more traditional practices.
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My point about marketing is simply that it's impossible to market to everybody equally. You have to target somebody, and I just feel that targeting the guys who want the higher quality or higher quantity of goods and are willing to pay for it is more productive than trying to get everybody who wants to pay the lowest possible price to pay up. Yes, the potential market is every reader on the planet who's online and reads ebooks, but you can't address their needs simultaneously with any degree of success.
That's why this model isn't as susceptible to piracy as the methods the majors are going for - nobody's excluded, but the people whose needs are favoured are the ones most likely to pay. Those less likely to pay - or those likely to pay less - are serviced by other retailers or other models for the same content.
While the market is setting a value, I don't see the problem. I don't agree that the pricing is due to people having leftover expectations from physical goods, but I do think that consumer demands will change over time as the ebook market matures. As long as these models keep track of the market and adjust according to consumer demand, they should be sustainable.
Well, thanks for your thoughts, it is nice to get someone's true opinion on here.
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blog comment
waxing ny and waxing nyc,body waxing nyc
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