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MDN Plus's plan to sell access to technical "deep dive" articles is not the right approach. (Can you think of anybody who makes real money selling deep dives on

MDN Plus's plan to sell access to technical "deep dive" articles is not the right approach. (Can you think of anybody who makes real money selling deep dives on the web?) We know how to do this "correctly." MDN Plus should be a VIP pass to access to the MDN team, via a private forum and/or chat room. Talk to (survey) the paying users for what new material they're interested in, and provide that. This is how basically all Patreons work. People buy those subscriptions like hotcakes, they have excellent margins, and the subscribers are reliably very satisfied with the result.

tempest_ 5y ago
Yeah, except didnt they just get rid of most of the team. "Deep Dives" can be farmed out to contractors and you dont have to worry about paying employees.
- throwanem 5y ago
  Or keeping the free content up to date, since you're concerned about revenue streams now and that isn't one of them. "Nothing is changing," indeed...
JohnBooty 5y ago
Depends on what you mean by "real money." On the fully indie side of things Michael Hartl has been doing it for a while with Ruby, front-end technologies, and seems to be doing OK for himself. I don't know what kind of profit we're talking about but it seems that it's enough to keep at it. https://www.learnenough.com/ https://www.learnenough.com/ Then there's Udemy. Max S. has 1.4 million "students" which I believe means his courses have been purchased a combined 1.4 million times. If we assume an average selling price of about $10 that's a lot of money even when we subtract Udemy's cut of the money. https://www.udemy.com/user/maximilian-schwarzmuller/ https://www.udemy.com/user/maximilian-schwarzmuller/ In general, be thoughtful when considering what you think "makes money" on the web. While not easy to achieve, there are a lot of folks making very good livings selling things on the web. But of course it's not going to make headlines if they are "only" making $100K or $500K. The press is only really interested in gaudy public stock offerings worth billions. In the specific case of MDN, it certainly seems like they could sustain themselves using this model. If 10,000 people sign up and pay $10 a month that's $1.2 million/year in revenue. Certainly enough to pay for a rack of servers, some dedicated staff, and a rotating cast of outside contributors to write the articles.
- dfabulich 5y ago
  Hartl sells books, not articles, which he sells as "tutorials" (classes). You're not meant to read and enjoy just one chapter of his book "Learn Enough Git to Be Dangerous" in isolation; he doesn't just send out a "deep dive" article each month on whatever he wants. It is absolutely possible to make money selling classes/tutorials (e.g. via Udemy or any of a variety of other online class platform), but MDN is already committed to making its classes/tutorials available for free https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Tutorials https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Tutorials It's an essential component of MDN Plus that they have to say exactly what they say in TFA: "Nothing is changing with the existing MDN Web Docs content — this content will continue to be free and available to everyone." As a result, MDN can't practically sell books OR classes. What's left? VIP access.
  - JohnBooty 5y ago
    In your parent post you suggested that nobody's making "real money" doing this. I provided counterexamples. Yeah, sure, slightly different models. But plenty of people are selling this kind of content and achieving financial success -- and that's without the benefit of MDN's brand recognition. Clearly, it can be done. What is your point now? That these counterexamples don't have the exact same % mix of free vs. VIP content as MDN is proposing, therefore MDN can't financially sustain itself? Seems like quite a supposition. I see a wide variety of free/VIP % mixes out there. Doesn't seem like there's one right answer or magic formula. MDN may or may not succeed with this model. As with most things it comes down to execution. It's relatively new territory for Mozilla so I'm not convinced they'll pull it off. But it's not like some wild and untested/disproven model.
qbasic_forever 5y ago
> Can you think of anybody who makes real money selling deep dives on the web? It can be done on a small scale. The name escapes me but somebody big in the React world recently put out a course and made well over 5-6 figures in the first day of preorders alone. Now whether that scales to fund an entire organization or corporation remains to be seen.
truth_ 5y ago
This was my exact thought after seeing this. Selling Deep Dives? Who would pay for that? I would always trust open, free deep dives under open scrutiny and criticism more than something behind a paywall. Even if this is from Mozilla. A premium chat room/forum would have been miles better.
- ygjb 5y ago
  A premium chat room or forum doesn't make more sense because the people Mozilla would be paying to staff that channel are already on several open forums and most are willing to answer questions (even if that answer is RTFM and a redirect to an MDN page). Yes, they got rid of most of the team, bu the remaining team members that are there and pretty much all of the community contributors would quit if they were suddenly transitioned into paid tech support roles.
Rapzid 5y ago
Yeah.. If I were to throw down for something like this I would actually like for the content to be made available for free after a period. So, I would just be supporting. However, back to the topic of corporate sponsors.. I see a distinct lack of calling out who the sponsors are? We all know a lot of VERY big companies shut down their own doc efforts to throw in with MDN; why not sell them call-out spots on a list of sponsors? Tiered even? Doesn't have to be super intrusive but would potentially open up funding channels within those large companies.
Farow 5y ago
I feel like substack has proved that high quality writing can be monetized really well by providing contracts in the range of $200k/year for some of its writers.
webmaven 5y ago
> MDN Plus's plan to sell access to technical "deep dive" articles is not the right approach. (Can you think of anybody who makes real money selling deep dives on the web?) Sure. They're often called "ebooks".
twic 5y ago
> We know how to do this "correctly." Charge for the "Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches" content?

tempest_ 5y ago

Yeah, except didnt they just get rid of most of the team. "Deep Dives" can be farmed out to contractors and you dont have to worry about paying employees.

throwanem 5y ago
Or keeping the free content up to date, since you're concerned about revenue streams now and that isn't one of them. "Nothing is changing," indeed...

JohnBooty 5y ago

Depends on what you mean by "real money." On the fully indie side of things Michael Hartl has been doing it for a while with Ruby, front-end technologies, and seems to be doing OK for himself. I don't know what kind of profit we're talking about but it seems that it's enough to keep at it. https://www.learnenough.com/ https://www.learnenough.com/ Then there's Udemy. Max S. has 1.4 million "students" which I believe means his courses have been purchased a combined 1.4 million times. If we assume an average selling price of about $10 that's a lot of money even when we subtract Udemy's cut of the money. https://www.udemy.com/user/maximilian-schwarzmuller/ https://www.udemy.com/user/maximilian-schwarzmuller/ In general, be thoughtful when considering what you think "makes money" on the web. While not easy to achieve, there are a lot of folks making very good livings selling things on the web. But of course it's not going to make headlines if they are "only" making $100K or $500K. The press is only really interested in gaudy public stock offerings worth billions. In the specific case of MDN, it certainly seems like they could sustain themselves using this model. If 10,000 people sign up and pay $10 a month that's $1.2 million/year in revenue. Certainly enough to pay for a rack of servers, some dedicated staff, and a rotating cast of outside contributors to write the articles.

dfabulich 5y ago
Hartl sells books, not articles, which he sells as "tutorials" (classes). You're not meant to read and enjoy just one chapter of his book "Learn Enough Git to Be Dangerous" in isolation; he doesn't just send out a "deep dive" article each month on whatever he wants. It is absolutely possible to make money selling classes/tutorials (e.g. via Udemy or any of a variety of other online class platform), but MDN is already committed to making its classes/tutorials available for free https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Tutorials https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Tutorials It's an essential component of MDN Plus that they have to say exactly what they say in TFA: "Nothing is changing with the existing MDN Web Docs content — this content will continue to be free and available to everyone." As a result, MDN can't practically sell books OR classes. What's left? VIP access.
- JohnBooty 5y ago
  In your parent post you suggested that nobody's making "real money" doing this. I provided counterexamples. Yeah, sure, slightly different models. But plenty of people are selling this kind of content and achieving financial success -- and that's without the benefit of MDN's brand recognition. Clearly, it can be done. What is your point now? That these counterexamples don't have the exact same % mix of free vs. VIP content as MDN is proposing, therefore MDN can't financially sustain itself? Seems like quite a supposition. I see a wide variety of free/VIP % mixes out there. Doesn't seem like there's one right answer or magic formula. MDN may or may not succeed with this model. As with most things it comes down to execution. It's relatively new territory for Mozilla so I'm not convinced they'll pull it off. But it's not like some wild and untested/disproven model.

qbasic_forever 5y ago

> Can you think of anybody who makes real money selling deep dives on the web? It can be done on a small scale. The name escapes me but somebody big in the React world recently put out a course and made well over 5-6 figures in the first day of preorders alone. Now whether that scales to fund an entire organization or corporation remains to be seen.

truth_ 5y ago

This was my exact thought after seeing this. Selling Deep Dives? Who would pay for that? I would always trust open, free deep dives under open scrutiny and criticism more than something behind a paywall. Even if this is from Mozilla. A premium chat room/forum would have been miles better.

ygjb 5y ago
A premium chat room or forum doesn't make more sense because the people Mozilla would be paying to staff that channel are already on several open forums and most are willing to answer questions (even if that answer is RTFM and a redirect to an MDN page). Yes, they got rid of most of the team, bu the remaining team members that are there and pretty much all of the community contributors would quit if they were suddenly transitioned into paid tech support roles.

Rapzid 5y ago

Yeah.. If I were to throw down for something like this I would actually like for the content to be made available for free after a period. So, I would just be supporting. However, back to the topic of corporate sponsors.. I see a distinct lack of calling out who the sponsors are? We all know a lot of VERY big companies shut down their own doc efforts to throw in with MDN; why not sell them call-out spots on a list of sponsors? Tiered even? Doesn't have to be super intrusive but would potentially open up funding channels within those large companies.

Farow 5y ago

I feel like substack has proved that high quality writing can be monetized really well by providing contracts in the range of $200k/year for some of its writers.

webmaven 5y ago

> MDN Plus's plan to sell access to technical "deep dive" articles is not the right approach. (Can you think of anybody who makes real money selling deep dives on the web?) Sure. They're often called "ebooks".

twic 5y ago

> We know how to do this "correctly." Charge for the "Pools, Hot Tubs, and Beaches" content?