6 ms·

I wonder if this will work - Roger Ebert on website monetization.

37 points by mds 17y ago

mattmaroon 17y ago
Took me a minute to realize he meant paywall when he said firewall. But yeah, I'm not sure I see a paywall working for him. If I were him, my first attempt to monetize would be a Netflix affiliate program.
- ewjordan 17y ago
  I see that he is including Amazon affiliate ads on the review pages; I assume that must not be working very well for him, which surprises me a bit, as I rent movies all the time through Amazon (it's one of a very small handful of places I actually shell out money for entertainment on the web). You'd think the most famous movie reviewer of all time would have pretty good results with movie referrals... I wonder whether part of that might not be the placement and format of the ads? At least for movies with online rentals and purchases available, I'd think that a plain old hypertext "Watch [insert movie name] online at Amazon" link right at the end of the review with his affiliate code embedded would probably perform pretty well, as opposed to a clearly separated block style ad up near the top that only links to the DVD purchase page. He could at least have both...I can't for the life of me understand why you wouldn't have an ad right at the end of the review, where people are most likely to be moving on to another page rather than sticking around and reading more...
  - brandnewlow 17y ago
    You rent movies all the time through Amazon, but do you do it from Ebert's page? No, you go straight there and do your thing. This is why CPA ads and affiliate links are a bad deal for content sites. You come there to read stuff, not buy stuff. When you want to buy something, you search for it directly.
    - ewjordan 17y ago
      You're right, I never rent from Ebert's page, but that's mainly because I don't read Ebert's page. If I did, and I saw a review of something that looked like I liked it, I'd be fairly likely to click a link to the Amazon rental page if it was visible in the right place, because it would save me a few clicks and searches. Of course, that's irrelevant, because he doesn't have links to the rentals on his page, he has links to the DVDs, and they're not even in view anymore once you've read to the bottom his review. So it's almost exactly as much effort to go through his affiliate link as it would be to search for the movie myself. If I had to guess, placement alone cuts his revenue from that source by at least a factor of 2 or 3, possibly even a factor of 10 or more. And Ebert's site is not a content site, it's a review site (a highly respected one, at that). Review sites usually do very well at driving sales compared to other types of sites. That's the main reason there are review sites for all sorts of products on the web. You most certainly do not go to Ebert's site just to read articles on their own merits, you go to find out which movies are worth watching. If he thinks a movie is worth watching, I'd imagine that makes a lot of people watch that movie fairly soon after reading his review, so if that's not converting into sales he's probably got some part of his affiliate strategy wrong in a very bad way.
mechanical_fish 17y ago
Through March, we'll have a special introductory rate of $4.99 for a year's membership. After April 1, the price will shoot up to $5. The humor value of this sentence sells itself.
- philwelch 17y ago
  I once paid Slashdot $5 just so I could have access to all of my old comments. In retrospect, taking my own content hostage is one of the few effective ways to get money out of me.
  - DanielBMarkham 17y ago
    This may be the most insightful thing I've read here all week.
  - wallflower 17y ago
    I would pay to download all of my saved links from Hacker News so that I could dump them in a searchable database. There are so many times I remember seeing something relevant on HN (and sometimes http://searchyc.com http://searchyc.com doesn't work 'You broke the server'). I haven't examined the Arc source code to see if saved links ages old links out of the db automatically.
retro 17y ago
His talk about micropayments makes me wonder why it hasn't come further than it has in all the years since it was first talked about. He mentions Google Checkout as a possible provider. But I would guess Paypal and Amazon's payment solutions have a bigger foothold. Anyone know of any widely used "micropayment" solutions?
- steveklabnik 17y ago
  The failings of µpayments are both social and technical. The transaction costs still eat up a micropayment on the technical side, and the gap between "free" and "costs something" in psychology ruins the social side. Flattr is the most interesting approach to this "problem" yet.
  - drags 17y ago
    On the psychology, I think it's more a positioning problem than a cost problem. For instance, I'm more than happy to pay $0.10 on Lala to listen to a song, but that's because all of my purchases are collected in such a way that they're easy to return to later. As a result it feels like I'm paying for some kind of ownership. I think it's much harder to conceptualize paying for a news article as providing some sort of ownership interest. Fact is, there are several authors and essays I read over and over again, but that's probably less than 1% of my internet reading. You're basically asking me to pay to own something I don't want to own. Granted, news orgs are spinning micropayments as paying for a service, but each individual article fits more naturally into my idea of product (tangible, doesn't really change) than service.
  - tszyn 17y ago
    I think the psychological problem isn't as big as it's made out to be. Every time you turn on the lights or plug in your mobile phone charger, you're making a micropayment to your power supplier. Yet you use electrical appliances every day without giving it a second thought. Why? Because you know, more or less, what your typical usage ends up costing you and you mentally accept that expense in advance.
    - 17y ago
fbailey 17y ago
Affiliate programms for Netflix and Amazon, highly targeted to the actual movies, add local Coupon Ad Systems from cinemas (I know they don't existyet), now double the traffic with some SEO optimization (nothing bad, just better cross linking on the site), get higher conversion rates to regular users by integrating email supscriptions at the end of every article... target the email newsletter by city.... ad local cinema advertisement by a small self service ad system ... I think it's quite possible to make substantial amounts of money with Roger Eberts site.
- jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
  Someone needs to set up an affiliate type program for local businesses.
  - sachinag 17y ago
    I'm not sure how this would drive incremental sales instead of being unprofitable payments for sales you were gonna get anyway.
    - jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
      are you talking specifically about the movie theater or affiliate marketing in general?
      - sachinag 17y ago
        Local affiliate marketing in general.
  - tk999 17y ago
    I love to discuss about how to setup affiliate type program for local business. One of the problem is payment tracking. I am trying to come up a solution. Love to talk about it...
    - tbgvi 17y ago
Sukotto 17y ago
Everytime I hear the term "micropayments" I think of the penny arcade comic: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/6/22/ http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/6/22/
jonas_b 17y ago
An idea on content micro-payments that just came into my head: Let's say that you are a user that wants to contribute $10/mo for all the good blogs and content that you consumer online. You go to paymentstartup.com which puts a cookie in your browser. All content providers that wants money from paymentstartup.com users will add a tracker to their website that will report to paymentstartup.com whenever somebody has visited their blog ir whatever. Then, by the end of the month, you might have visited 50 blogs so paymentstartup.com splits your contribution among these sites using some smart algorithm. What do you think?
- matt1 17y ago
  I believe that's what http://www.kachingle.com/ http://www.kachingle.com/ is trying to do.
  - tbgvi 17y ago
    I think that's the idea behind http://www.flattr.com http://www.flattr.com as well
niels_olson 17y ago
An allergist I know told me that the New England Journal of Medicine once offered a lifetime subscription for $500. For context, the annual price right now $159. Among medical journals, that's cheap. $500 for a lifetime subscription would be unfathomable. Only problem was that in the mid 1980s, medical residents just didn't have $500 to cough up (well, about 75% of their parents might have, but that's another story).
sparky 17y ago
Did anyone watch that first Youtube video with the guy talking in a bookstore? I highly recommend it for entertainment value, but it's hard to tell what the guy's point is w.r.t. micropayments. Payments are totally orthogonal to where the thing you are or are not paying for is stored. Also, the "local caches" he refers to are copies.

37 points by mds 17y ago

Took me a minute to realize he meant paywall when he said firewall. But yeah, I'm not sure I see a paywall working for him. If I were him, my first attempt to monetize would be a Netflix affiliate program.

ewjordan 17y ago
I see that he is including Amazon affiliate ads on the review pages; I assume that must not be working very well for him, which surprises me a bit, as I rent movies all the time through Amazon (it's one of a very small handful of places I actually shell out money for entertainment on the web). You'd think the most famous movie reviewer of all time would have pretty good results with movie referrals... I wonder whether part of that might not be the placement and format of the ads? At least for movies with online rentals and purchases available, I'd think that a plain old hypertext "Watch [insert movie name] online at Amazon" link right at the end of the review with his affiliate code embedded would probably perform pretty well, as opposed to a clearly separated block style ad up near the top that only links to the DVD purchase page. He could at least have both...I can't for the life of me understand why you wouldn't have an ad right at the end of the review, where people are most likely to be moving on to another page rather than sticking around and reading more...
- brandnewlow 17y ago
  You rent movies all the time through Amazon, but do you do it from Ebert's page? No, you go straight there and do your thing. This is why CPA ads and affiliate links are a bad deal for content sites. You come there to read stuff, not buy stuff. When you want to buy something, you search for it directly.
  - ewjordan 17y ago
    You're right, I never rent from Ebert's page, but that's mainly because I don't read Ebert's page. If I did, and I saw a review of something that looked like I liked it, I'd be fairly likely to click a link to the Amazon rental page if it was visible in the right place, because it would save me a few clicks and searches. Of course, that's irrelevant, because he doesn't have links to the rentals on his page, he has links to the DVDs, and they're not even in view anymore once you've read to the bottom his review. So it's almost exactly as much effort to go through his affiliate link as it would be to search for the movie myself. If I had to guess, placement alone cuts his revenue from that source by at least a factor of 2 or 3, possibly even a factor of 10 or more. And Ebert's site is not a content site, it's a review site (a highly respected one, at that). Review sites usually do very well at driving sales compared to other types of sites. That's the main reason there are review sites for all sorts of products on the web. You most certainly do not go to Ebert's site just to read articles on their own merits, you go to find out which movies are worth watching. If he thinks a movie is worth watching, I'd imagine that makes a lot of people watch that movie fairly soon after reading his review, so if that's not converting into sales he's probably got some part of his affiliate strategy wrong in a very bad way.

mechanical_fish 17y ago

Through March, we'll have a special introductory rate of $4.99 for a year's membership. After April 1, the price will shoot up to $5. The humor value of this sentence sells itself.

philwelch 17y ago
I once paid Slashdot $5 just so I could have access to all of my old comments. In retrospect, taking my own content hostage is one of the few effective ways to get money out of me.
- DanielBMarkham 17y ago
  This may be the most insightful thing I've read here all week.
- wallflower 17y ago
  I would pay to download all of my saved links from Hacker News so that I could dump them in a searchable database. There are so many times I remember seeing something relevant on HN (and sometimes http://searchyc.com http://searchyc.com doesn't work 'You broke the server'). I haven't examined the Arc source code to see if saved links ages old links out of the db automatically.

retro 17y ago

His talk about micropayments makes me wonder why it hasn't come further than it has in all the years since it was first talked about. He mentions Google Checkout as a possible provider. But I would guess Paypal and Amazon's payment solutions have a bigger foothold. Anyone know of any widely used "micropayment" solutions?

steveklabnik 17y ago
The failings of µpayments are both social and technical. The transaction costs still eat up a micropayment on the technical side, and the gap between "free" and "costs something" in psychology ruins the social side. Flattr is the most interesting approach to this "problem" yet.
- drags 17y ago
  On the psychology, I think it's more a positioning problem than a cost problem. For instance, I'm more than happy to pay $0.10 on Lala to listen to a song, but that's because all of my purchases are collected in such a way that they're easy to return to later. As a result it feels like I'm paying for some kind of ownership. I think it's much harder to conceptualize paying for a news article as providing some sort of ownership interest. Fact is, there are several authors and essays I read over and over again, but that's probably less than 1% of my internet reading. You're basically asking me to pay to own something I don't want to own. Granted, news orgs are spinning micropayments as paying for a service, but each individual article fits more naturally into my idea of product (tangible, doesn't really change) than service.
- tszyn 17y ago
  I think the psychological problem isn't as big as it's made out to be. Every time you turn on the lights or plug in your mobile phone charger, you're making a micropayment to your power supplier. Yet you use electrical appliances every day without giving it a second thought. Why? Because you know, more or less, what your typical usage ends up costing you and you mentally accept that expense in advance.
  - 17y ago

fbailey 17y ago

Affiliate programms for Netflix and Amazon, highly targeted to the actual movies, add local Coupon Ad Systems from cinemas (I know they don't existyet), now double the traffic with some SEO optimization (nothing bad, just better cross linking on the site), get higher conversion rates to regular users by integrating email supscriptions at the end of every article... target the email newsletter by city.... ad local cinema advertisement by a small self service ad system ... I think it's quite possible to make substantial amounts of money with Roger Eberts site.

jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
Someone needs to set up an affiliate type program for local businesses.
- sachinag 17y ago
  I'm not sure how this would drive incremental sales instead of being unprofitable payments for sales you were gonna get anyway.
  - jasonlbaptiste 17y ago
    are you talking specifically about the movie theater or affiliate marketing in general?
    - sachinag 17y ago
      Local affiliate marketing in general.
- tk999 17y ago
  I love to discuss about how to setup affiliate type program for local business. One of the problem is payment tracking. I am trying to come up a solution. Love to talk about it...
  - tbgvi 17y ago

Sukotto 17y ago

Everytime I hear the term "micropayments" I think of the penny arcade comic: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/6/22/ http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2001/6/22/

jonas_b 17y ago

An idea on content micro-payments that just came into my head: Let's say that you are a user that wants to contribute $10/mo for all the good blogs and content that you consumer online. You go to paymentstartup.com which puts a cookie in your browser. All content providers that wants money from paymentstartup.com users will add a tracker to their website that will report to paymentstartup.com whenever somebody has visited their blog ir whatever. Then, by the end of the month, you might have visited 50 blogs so paymentstartup.com splits your contribution among these sites using some smart algorithm. What do you think?

matt1 17y ago
I believe that's what http://www.kachingle.com/ http://www.kachingle.com/ is trying to do.
- tbgvi 17y ago
  I think that's the idea behind http://www.flattr.com http://www.flattr.com as well

niels_olson 17y ago

An allergist I know told me that the New England Journal of Medicine once offered a lifetime subscription for $500. For context, the annual price right now $159. Among medical journals, that's cheap. $500 for a lifetime subscription would be unfathomable. Only problem was that in the mid 1980s, medical residents just didn't have $500 to cough up (well, about 75% of their parents might have, but that's another story).

sparky 17y ago

Did anyone watch that first Youtube video with the guy talking in a bookstore? I highly recommend it for entertainment value, but it's hard to tell what the guy's point is w.r.t. micropayments. Payments are totally orthogonal to where the thing you are or are not paying for is stored. Also, the "local caches" he refers to are copies.