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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

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.

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.