Request for Comments
Feb. 21st, 2004 11:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
andrewduckerThere are only five distribution models that can make money in an age of instant data duplication:
1) Don't let it out of the box until you've been paid for it, but once you’ve been paid, release it with as freeware. This has the disadvantage that unless people know who you are, you can’t get paid at all. Even then, there are problems where if the money isn’t raised you can either lower your demands (thus assuring that people won’t pay less time) or sit on a piece of work you’ve finished and never get paid for it.
2) Don't make money off of the data, make it off of selling physical items associated with the data. (where the physical items can range from hardcopy versions of the data to t-shirts which associate you with it). This is great if you’re Penny Arcade and people really want your T-shirts, but how many people want Norman Mailer posters?
3) Licensing the data to other people (so that they can use it to sell things, make their own products out of, make films out of, etc.). Great, unless nobody wants to make a movie out of your book, or to sell happy meals of it.
4) Charging for simplified, reliable access to the data. So that, yeah, you could go and track down the UA books on Kazaa and spend ages trying to find someone who has them, but if UA.com charged you $2 a book for a downloadable version, you'd fork it over just to save on the hassle. Not a bad one this. And this is quite common now, in some ways – I’ll pay to read things now even if I thought that I might be able to track them down in a couple of days, given the spare time. For people who don’t like internet searches, this becomes worth even more.
5) Begging. Where you just ask people to send you money because they think you deserve it. Which can work wonders, if you have that kind of devoted following. But if everyone does it, I’m not sure there’s enough money to go around.
The current system is basically a cross between (2) and (4), where they try to make the copying as hard as possible so that it's easier for you to pay for access to the CD/book/computer program. This will only continue to work so long as data sized are too large to easily transfer (it's failed already for books and music) or usage requires a service that's held centrally (i.e. Steam, which requires a centralised authenticator before you can access your game).
I want to know what pros and cons people see in these. I want to know which of these people will go for. I want to know if anyone can think of alternatives to these. If you know anyone who has an interest in this kind of thing, pass it in their direction. Get me feedback!
1) Don't let it out of the box until you've been paid for it, but once you’ve been paid, release it with as freeware. This has the disadvantage that unless people know who you are, you can’t get paid at all. Even then, there are problems where if the money isn’t raised you can either lower your demands (thus assuring that people won’t pay less time) or sit on a piece of work you’ve finished and never get paid for it.
2) Don't make money off of the data, make it off of selling physical items associated with the data. (where the physical items can range from hardcopy versions of the data to t-shirts which associate you with it). This is great if you’re Penny Arcade and people really want your T-shirts, but how many people want Norman Mailer posters?
3) Licensing the data to other people (so that they can use it to sell things, make their own products out of, make films out of, etc.). Great, unless nobody wants to make a movie out of your book, or to sell happy meals of it.
4) Charging for simplified, reliable access to the data. So that, yeah, you could go and track down the UA books on Kazaa and spend ages trying to find someone who has them, but if UA.com charged you $2 a book for a downloadable version, you'd fork it over just to save on the hassle. Not a bad one this. And this is quite common now, in some ways – I’ll pay to read things now even if I thought that I might be able to track them down in a couple of days, given the spare time. For people who don’t like internet searches, this becomes worth even more.
5) Begging. Where you just ask people to send you money because they think you deserve it. Which can work wonders, if you have that kind of devoted following. But if everyone does it, I’m not sure there’s enough money to go around.
The current system is basically a cross between (2) and (4), where they try to make the copying as hard as possible so that it's easier for you to pay for access to the CD/book/computer program. This will only continue to work so long as data sized are too large to easily transfer (it's failed already for books and music) or usage requires a service that's held centrally (i.e. Steam, which requires a centralised authenticator before you can access your game).
I want to know what pros and cons people see in these. I want to know which of these people will go for. I want to know if anyone can think of alternatives to these. If you know anyone who has an interest in this kind of thing, pass it in their direction. Get me feedback!
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no subject
Date: 2004-02-21 05:04 pm (UTC)My preference would be for a mixture of 1 & 2. It is my suspicion that options like Street Performer Protocol (ie 1) would work exceptionally well for both widely popular and niche-popular data. The problem is that this is so radically different from modern models of commerce that people are suspicious of it. With luck, more people will try option 1 and so help people become sufficiently used to it for it to become popular.
As an author and an anarcho-socialist, I prefer option 1 because it means a near-guaranteed income for creators (the price set by the author) combined with an acknowledgment that information cannot and (IMHO) should not be owned. Also, I greatly distrust and dislike market speculation such as royalties and the whole idea of income being directly dependent upon sales.
The key to all of these (including what we have now) is creators having sufficient publicity to be noticed and so to have people look for their work. Today, we have parasitic agencies like publishers and the recording industry that take the vast majority of money, give creators a pittance, but do the work of advertising. I would love to see other options for this. Frankly, good and well-known reviewers could do the same job in an age of easy data access, but they could not be paid directly by the authors or their opinions would have no worth.
It is perhaps useful to note that the vast majority of musicians exclusively use option 1, since they make almost no (or frequently absolutely no) money from album sales and make all of their money from concerts.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-22 04:55 am (UTC)I hate it when I forget my quotation marks...
Andrew, looking into the past, people paid less for the data and more for access to it. Since the advent of the copy machine, it's been possible to copy an entire book, but one's time would be better spent making the money to purchase it. Books have never worked very well with a capitalist system--the overhead on book production has always been the source of their price (which was, before the printing press, prohibitively high)--but now books are simply data and production costs are effectively zero.
The only other distribution method I can think of is some combination of your others like that used at some medical websites, in which general content is free (to demonstrate reputability, create mindshare), but personalized doctor's opinions are available for a price.
I think it may be interesting to consider that the information itself has been free for much of history, but it's obvious that those who create nothing but code full-time need to eat. Maybe capitalism isn't the best way to feed them?
-Xander
Re: I hate it when I forget my quotation marks...
Date: 2004-02-23 12:40 am (UTC)That depends. A large percentage of code is written for in-house applications that don't see the light of day outside of the company. You can't copy those - you have to pay someone to write them for you.
Also, when I worked for a coding company, we had 80-odd clients. Most functionality went into the general code that all clients got, but sometimes only a subset were that interested in the functionality. So we'd get them together to pay for it to be written, but everyone got it. It seemed to work pretty well for everyone, and I don't think we ever had a problem with people pretending they didn't want something they did - because they knew that if they paid for it, it'd happen faster. Mind you, that was dealing with people who had the money for pay for what they wanted and weren't afraid to spend it, if it was justifiable.