Is this Mozilla's first non-free (as in speech), non-open source product?
MDN Plus
161–170 of 222 posts
Re: MDN Plus
#162Surprised at the focus on individual developers. That's a tough market.
Company teams where the buyer isn't also an user is the only way this is going to make any sustainable money. Sell an MDN Plus Teams and Enterprise flavors as upgrades to the free "hobby" variant, and market it as table-stakes that every valley dev team has an MDN Plus subscription, same as they have a paid GitHub account, because what kind of crappy outfit are you even running here if your devs don't have MDN Plus access day one? MSDN used to be 4-6 figures for teams of various sizes, so asking developers how much they'd be willing to pay doesn't really tell you anything, I'd be surprised if developers know what their GitHub hosting, CI, etc. is priced at.
Re: MDN Plus
#163MDN 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…
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.
Re: MDN Plus
#164MDN should be a separate company. Personally, I'm no longer interested in supporting Mozilla in any capacity. Their management behaves in a way that's consistent with the idea that it's barely more than controlled opposition to Google's Chrome team.
I don't get how the company had the head-count it did for so long and didn't even manage to tread water in relation to other browsers, for about a decade, let alone do anything new or interesting. Which parts were valuable and interesting? Rust/Servo, and MDN. Which parts get cut? Those. I'd love to see them make a come-back, but it's been so damn long and they're showing so many strongly negative signs that I think…
Because the leadership (CEO) is ineffective at best. Poor leadership led to poor decision-making and lack of strategy and focus.
I was once a strong supporter of Mozilla but never again.
Re: MDN Plus
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/ Then there's Udemy. Max S. has 1.4 million "students" which I believe means his courses have been pu…
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…
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.
Re: MDN Plus
#166This reminded me that I wanted to donate to MDN. And I just went on a quick journey through the MDN web site to find how and where you can do that. It's not clear to me at all how or even if you can donate to MDN. Am I missing something? Elsewhere in this thread is a link to a separate organization called "OpenWebDocs," which appears to be an outside consortium that contributes to MDN. So perhaps donating to them is…
> Elsewhere in this thread is a link to a separate organization called "OpenWebDocs," which appears to be an outside consortium that contributes to MDN.
Yes, that's what Open Web Docs is. It's funded by individual and corporate contributions, through https://opencollective.com/open-web-docs/. The money goes to pay writers (currently 2 full time, but we are hiring 2 more) to create and maintain independent open web documentation ("open" in the sense of accessible to everyone, "independent" in the sense that it shouldn't represent any one company's view). Currently our work is pretty much entirely focused on MDN, although that's not necessarily going to be the only thing we ever work on. Our 2021 high-level goals: https://github.com/openwebdocs/project/blob/main/2021-goals.... .
Re: MDN Plus
#167I'll likely toss them the $10/month they are suggesting, MDN is priceless and helps me make an income daily/weekly!
Re: MDN Plus
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I mean..aren't they doing exactly that?
They are naming different prices for different people. You walk into a bar and the guy in front of you orders a beer for $5. Looks good, so you order the same thing. The bartender says, "For you it's $10." Do you feel fairly treated?
If you sold ice cream on the street and needed to figure out how to become profitable, would you be so opposed to trying out selling at $5 one day and $7 the next? Or would this be too unfair to the people that paid $5?
It's the intent I guess. The bartender story seems to imply a bad reason for the discrepancy (some type of unfair discrimination), while in this case it's to find out if you can charge more to eg capture back more of the value people are getting from you. Which doesn't seem so bad.
Re: MDN Plus
#169Beyond the purely technical API documentation, I saw a (small) number of what looked like an article tying an entire API together and explaining how it works, or giving examples, like https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/WebRTC_API/...
Are those now going to be paywalled?
Re: MDN Plus
#170I wish they’d clarify if the money is used to support MDN or not. I wouldn’t be opposed to supporting MDN patreon style, and if it comes with “perks” like articles, sure, why not. But I would do this to support MDNs core documentation , not because I’m dying for technical deep dives. That said $10/mo is a bit steep for me. And in any event, if they don’t make explicit that the money goes to support MDN upkeep and dev…
If you use MDN once or twice a month it's still well worth the $10, IMO. I use it way more frequently than that.