481–490 of 610 posts
Maybe a pay per click business model where you get a monthly bill from your IP for your internet activity in websites that require payment is an alternative
That seems fraught with peril for abuse, I'm already handing over enough money to those crooks at my ISP..
At the time of this writing, all of the comments here are focused on content, but I want to touch on the author's bit about software: > It’s not just Bloomberg and media — it’s software too. I used to write everything in Ulysses, a syncing Markdown editor for OS X and iOS. I paid $70 to buy the apps, but then the company switched to a $40 a year annual subscription, and as the dozens of angry reviews and comments ill…
There is a difference between paying for tools that bring value, and discretionary spending. If I am paying for software that I use to be more efficient and increases my profits, I am OK with a subscription model, or whatever model is offered. This is, as long as the cost of the software is considerably lower than the value bump I get from using it. With discretionary spending, it takes a lot for me to buy a subscrip…
blendle.com offers basically exactly what you're asking for. (Not in any way affiliated with the site, just an occasional user)
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It doesn't for the simple reason that they provide updates for the entire year. Surely those updates aren't provided for free. They are provided for purchase you made in advance for a year. If I cancel midway I should be entitled for all the updates till the end of the period. Unless those updates were free and not part of the sale. In which case, the licensee should still get those updates anyways for the period. Yo…
They sell you version at the time of purchase (fallback license) + access to updates, all accounted at the date of purchase. So when your subscription runs out in theory you could get old version then apply updates but you have no access so no updates for you.
But that is denial of service that I legitimately paid for. Either they should provide the updates till end of subscription or refund the collected update fees pro-rata (viz. if I cancel after 9 months of purchase, 3 months of excess update fee collected should be refunded).
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> One thing that always rubbed me wrong about this is that, logically speaking, if you buy a license for a year, the perpetual fallback license should be the version you had at the end of the license, not the one that was on the market at the beginning of it. It doesn't really make sense the way they do it, and it feels like a particularly hamfisted attempt to grab an almost negligible amount of money, so I'm puzzled…
I'm not an accountant but presumably you treat it the same as the fairly common purchase+service contract. You have a sale of a license (of the version at time of purchase) and the prepaid service contract that either converts to revenue over time, or, if non-refundable, converts to revenue immediately. The proportion between the two components is fairly arbitrary. There is no constraint on how they implement this fr…
I'm not a certified accountant either but I took the course just to understand workings of my business.
> they can change to allowing the user to keep the latest version they upgraded to without serious consequence
It'll be in their best interests if they did.
> you can just as easily sell "product version X with one year of updates" which is very common as well, and mark that as revenue right away
You definitely can. But you end up overstating your revenue and in turn your profits. The downside to that is you end up paying high taxes (unless you can minimize your profit by showing a ton of expenses as well). If it was instead treated as Unearned Revenue (which is a liability), you would be stating your true income and showing lower profits and thereby paying lower taxes.
Take for instance the case where your customer purchases a multi-year subscription. This causes a higher cash flow (assets go up) but you won't be overstating your income (as liability goes up by classifying it as Unearned Revenue instead of owner's equity). The liability can be reduced by claiming it as revenue over a multi-year period. If it was marked as revenue at the time of sale, the owner's equity (retained earnings) would go up. That would mean showing higher income which results in higher profits and you end up paying high taxes.
Remember that with unearned revenue you can carry it over to multiple financial years and spread your income between them. You lose out on this important tax saving component if you mark as revenue right away. This also has the advantage of portraying a true picture of your business in your books of accounts.
I disagree with the author that subscriptions are objectively and inherently the superior model for web monetization. An unsung virtue of the ad-driven web it's is inclusiveness and strong worldwide redistribution effects. Everybody sees the ads, however the actual value of a pair of eyeballs is widely variable, by orders of magnitude so. It's therefore profitable to make the content free and distribute it as far as…
> An unsung virtue of the ad-driven web it's is inclusiveness and strong worldwide redistribution effects. Everybody sees the ads, however the actual value of a pair of eyeballs is widely variable, by orders of magnitude so. It's therefore profitable to make the content free and distribute it as far as possible, to have the best chance of catching high value visitors that covert to ad action and revenue. > Once you m…
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There is a way to provide upgrade pricing for iOS. It's an ugly hack though.... 2015 - you sold v1 for $5.00 2017 - you start selling v2. You sell v1 for $5.00 but in the description tell everyone not to buy it. You sell v2 for $5.00 but direct people who have already bought v1 to buy the bundle of v1 and v2 that you price at $8. Anyone who has already bought v1 can buy the bundle for $3.
and now, you have v3. The bundling will grow exponentially!
N * (N + 1) / 2
At the time of this writing, all of the comments here are focused on content, but I want to touch on the author's bit about software: > It’s not just Bloomberg and media — it’s software too. I used to write everything in Ulysses, a syncing Markdown editor for OS X and iOS. I paid $70 to buy the apps, but then the company switched to a $40 a year annual subscription, and as the dozens of angry reviews and comments ill…
As a software (SaaS) developer, I find this comment outright bizarre. I find it is hard to make a living with $50/month subscriptions, if you write niche software (and believe me, you DO write niche software, you are not Dropbox), much less support an entire company.
Have you actually done the numbers before writing that "price is vastly out of proportion"? Just take the total cost (roughly 2x salary) of several people, divide by that $40/year and see how many subscriptions you come up with. I'm getting ~25000 subscriptions for 5 employees, just to break even, and we haven't even touched the marketing required to get 25000 subscriptions.
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A model I really like is the one IntelliJ uses. They encourage you to buy a subscription. But when you buy a year at once, you get a "perpetual fallback license" such that you can always keep using the version that is current when you buy: https://sales.jetbrains.com/hc/en-gb/articles/207240845-What... That means I always will have access to my projects and to the level of functionality I start with. But I keep getti…
They also drop the subscription rate after the first and second years. And even at the outset, the “everything JetBrains” license is cheaper than any two individually licensed products. If you do, say, Java and C# or Python and C++, this makes it a pretty sweet deal. I wasn’t aware that the perpetual fallback license only covered the latest version at the time of subscription/renewal. That’s less than ideal, but apar…
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In the EU, the GDPR will make data takeout APIs (or some guy exporting as CSV and mailing it to you) mandatory.
> data takeout APIs the data will be useless other than as a source of information. If you have data for an online vector editor, the vector data can be legally taken out via a common format (such as json), but there'll be no importers for this shape of data. Any business can easily construe a common machine readable format that's also completely custom, and unimportable anywhere else, to satisfy the letter of the la…
If they frequently change this format to break those implementations or clearly make it much more complex than it needs to be, that can also have legal repercussions.
For a lot of digital businesses a subscription makes sense. Imagine if back in the day Rails Casts was $3 an episode instead of $20 per month for unlimited monthly access. Suddenly if you wanted to learn Rails, you'd end up watching many dozens or hundreds of 5-10 minute videos for $3 a pop. You would constantly feel like you're being nickel and dimed. It's hard enough to get someone to buy from you once, but expecti…
Or you could pay $40 once for a book: https://smile.amazon.com/Rails-Way-Addison-Wesley-Profession... I think the greatest loss of the modern web has been this explicit move away from literacy. It's like the dark days of television are back again.
And this is exactly why Rails Casts was great. You would Google "how do I sort table columns in Rails" and find the episode, watch it in about 10 minutes and implement it in your code base. Rails Casts has been dead for years and it still ranks in the top 3 today on Google for that phrase btw.
I don't want to flip through 1,000 pages in a book to find 1 specific feature I am struggling with right now. I may never find it.