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Comment by DanielStraight | Hacker News Reader

I find it strange he didn't mention selling something as a possible way to make money.

Free web content that you can buy in other forms (ebook, paper book) or buy extras for (videos, email support, courses) seems like a pretty common model these days.

In the board and card game world, you've got games where you can download a PDF board or PDF cards but if you want a professionally produced version, you can buy it.

In software, you've got the paid support model.

There's plenty of actually valuable things you can sell for minimal additional effort on top of producing the content in the first place. And remember the bar for "actually valuable" is pretty low: SQLite sells licenses for public domain software after all.

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Good point. The "book format" in particular has a lot of future. For example, packaging a series of blog posts into a short ebook on a topic, then investing time to polish the content can turn into an excellent "product" to be sold through the website. Fuck ads for other people's products, advertise your own!

It makes sense for blog posts to be free since they are "draft quality," but once an editor has put some thought into making a coherent and comprehensive guide to subject X, it's totally OK to charge for this extra work. And I mean "OK" not as a moral "is allowed to," but in the market "people will buy"-sense.

The extra work the author invests is called information distillation. The author "processes" a lot of information (primary sources like books, research, other webpages) and produces a comprehensive summary of the topic in question. Blog posts are "best effort" acts of information distillation; books are more thorough and deliberate efforts.

I can attest from personal experience that people are interested in information distillation today (I sell math books). I think this trend will continue into the future—the more information out there, the more people will need secondary sources to help them make sense of it.

People are also shockingly bad at economics. I remember from the econ101 course I was required to take that it's just the possible intersection of curves between what supply can cost and what demand is willing to pay in order to maximize profit.

A missing element is that often someone who has a copy of the content has a choice between buying another copy for someone else to read or loaning their own copy (book lending). If the marginal cost of buying a new copy is less than the overhead involved with lending another copy (often beneath impulse buy price) someone is MUCH more likely to buy a copy as a gift. Think about how much someone is willing to pay for a newspaper. I think 0.25 USD or less would be the natural price per copy. Copies should NOT have DRM. Just price them inexpensively enough that people don't feel a need to share it for free.

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