Hacker News Reader

Comment by WestCoastJustin | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, I totally want to put more episodes out, just a juggling act right now. Hopefully, I can figure out some way to work on them full time.

View on HN

Easy, charge $$ for them. This is great stuff, and people value it highly. You will have more time to work on them if there's income coming from them, and your customers will benefit from you covering more topics, more quickly. Everybody wins!

Three ideas:

- Make them all access free for the first week they're up, then charge for access to the back catalog. See CreativeLive[1] for a good example. This way everyone can measure the quality of video, audio, transcripts, etc so they know what they're getting, and the people who need to learn a specific topic will have a strong incentive to pay. This will encourage you to cover evergreen topics to make your back catalog more valuable

- Flip it and make the new videos available to subscribers for the 1st N months, then free afterwards. This will bias you towards covering the newest, churniest stuff that is causing people pain right now

- Do like RailsCasts and alternate between free and paid videos. Paid subscribers get twice as many videos, everybody still gets something free for marketing etc

Personally I think the first one is your best bet.

[1] https://www.creativelive.com/

Thanks very much for your feedback! You have several very good points that I will explore, specifically the various models that might work. Ideally, I'd like to keep the site free and maybe have a couple key sponsors or something, still exploring the idea.

Please charge money for this.

Paying 5 bucks per CC means nothing to you or me, but it would exclude a world of people from a learning resource, which is always sad.

You can make it optional or "Pay what you can" or "Pay it to the world" (somebody you see on the street)

You don't have to come up with a business model for your site at all, it's your baby, but a click-to-donate button wouldn't hurt :-)

Or use advertising and not charge anything and make money from businesses trying to target DevOps and SysAdmins which probably is pretty lucrative from a publisher standpoint.

I'm kind of wondering how sustainable a pay for screencasts business is. A couple people seem to have burned out on it (railscasts, Gary Bernhardt). I'm not sure if its the expectation of getting something new up every week or two weeks is too stressful or they just run out of material. Is it possible to keep it going without getting sick of it or running out of things to talk about?

There is probably some merit in the season model that American television takes. "I'm going to release 12/18/24/whatever episodes over the next six/eight/twelve months" is probably more sustainable than a weekly screencast pledge. Gives the author some time off to recharge, and (perhaps more importantly) some time for technology to evolve.

Since I have a background as a poker player one of the coaching sites (deucescracked) followed a season model whereas the others (cardrunners, leggopoker and later bluefire) were more similar to "release videos on a somewhat set schedule but not too strict"

It might actually be worthwhile comparing those sites to subscription based techcasts since both are in the business of selling expert knowledge.

One major difference I see is that the selling point of poker sites is that the players are successful so there might be value in a screencast site that focuses more on "rockstar developers" etc.

There exist many successful screencasts businesses. I think the main problem with "subscribe monthly for unlimited access and new screencasts every month" is the "new screencasts every month" bit. That is an issue with the business/charging model, not with publishing screencasts for money.

There's no reason why somebody with a back catalog of 200 episodes who doesn't have desire/bandwidth to record more can't sell access to the back catalog and fairly easily get to $X00,000 per year.

> Make them all access free for the first week they're up, then charge for access to the back catalog.

So, encourage someone to download each new video and distribute it via torrent once the paywall goes up. Cool.

Have a look at the laracasts site, they have a good mix of free/paid content and the price is very reasonable.

Thanks -- I'll check it out!

Instead of straight up charging, a Patreon account might be a good idea. Its sort of a middle road between donations and paying for content: http://www.patreon.com/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com