This Is Why I Want To Have A Paid, Premium Section Of Mixergy

I used to pay $100 a month for another service which has roughly the same value proposition (not naming it to avoid shilling), and paid for it in perpetuity by five words of microcopy it caused me to add to my purchasing page. Everything after that was gravy. I don't want to imply that five words doubled my conversions -- nothing close. It is just that a move-the-needle effect anywhere in a business where all factors are multiplicative achieves $100 so fast your head will spin. For those of you whose firms could lose my business in the petty cash drawer, changes so small I'm unable to even construct tests with sufficient precision to detect them will generate more than $100 a month.

- User arrives on page. The page says - all old interviews are available for purchase on iTunes for $4.99. There is an app store link

- There is another little link saying - don't have iTunes? Want access to our full archive for a year? Want to download the file in multiple formats as well as the raw live interview file? Want to support mixergy? Purchase an "Archive membership" card for $99 a year

- A yellow highlighted text: "But wait, there is a way for you to watch this interview for free right now. Simply copy and paste this embed code into your website, blog about it, hit the play button and watch it. You get the free video, I get some publicity"

We're entrepreneurs, and at the point where some of that information would be really useful to us, we're usually broke and in need of advice/help. Charging broke entrepreneurs to access your archive of content seems counter intuitive.

What I would be willing to pay for, however, is having access to a library of edited 4-5 minute videos. I'd really be willing to pay for those videos if I could search through or navigate those videos by specific questions and answers. That's the service that I want, and that would be worth around $10-14 a month to me.

And, as a reference point, I carried a Safari Library subscription for several years at $45 a month, which allowed me instant access to all of O'Reilly books library as well as a library of videos. I also pay to rent movies on Amazon at $2.99 a pop. I pay Rhapsody a $14 month subscription to have access to 1.5 million tracks of music on demand. I also pay Pandora $30 a year to have pretty good music recommendations streamed to me.

But as harsh as the comments about this on HN were this weekend, they were also helpful.

I think this will show you what I have in mind.

If you don't want to say anything publicly, email me: mail at awarner dot com

I'm also doing a video interview series, albeit on a smaller scale and even more niche (on getting traction). I plan on ramping this up significantly over the next few months, and eventually doing other niches I think will be valuable to this crowd. I also don't need the money, but I agree with Andrew that it sets an example and it creates a seriousness in the project (whereas with a hobby you can get lazy, which I have certainly been).

However, my core motivation (and I think Andrew's as well) is to help aspiring entrepreneurs. To do that, I think you want as wide an audience as possible on the videos.

There is an empirical question here that is unanswered: whether a paywall will actually increase video usage or not. Andrew will be able to answer that shortly, but I suspect it will not increase usage of the older content.

This is why I've made the decision to keep all interviews online and free. Instead any monetization will be done by books and/or DVDs. So here's one more possible trajectory for you:

1) Segment your interviews into sub-niches.

2) Get good transcripts.

3) Add synthesis and commentary around each sub-niche.

4) Sell books/dvds around each sub-niche.

5) Post the full transcript on each video page to get random SEO traffic.

6) Upsell your books/dvds (but not annoyingly).

Yes, I realize a lot of the book value will be on the Web (in both video and text form). But I think people will still buy your books.

The free-embed idea is definitely risky, but it might help if you require there to be a certain amount of unique text/editorial surrounding the embedded video in order to avoid abuse. Otherwise, I'm going out right now to register that domain.

Interviews are tough to monetize because the benefits are pretty intangible.

The Charlie Rose model is better I think. Where you do long 1 hr interviews and get sponsorships to help pay for costs. It depends on growing an audience but it can work.

Another idea -- what if Andrew was able to put together conferences/events given the ties he has. He could charge for admission and have a panel of start up entrepreneurs where he interviews and moderates Q&As between the audience and entrepreneurs. Conferences are generally pretty profitable and could be worth exploring.

Also, if embedding makes it free forever, what's to keep me from starting a "blog" where I just embed each interview the day it comes out and thus have a free archive of all of your interviews?

I've been a Mixergy fan for awhile. I watch what I can, when I can. The interviews are long, but definitely substantial. In other words, they should be long. Your preparation, the quality of the content, and the selection of your subjects, are all excellent.

Pay for it?

I haven't decided yet, but probably. I think a lot of other people will as well. The key is to make the subscription help bridge the gap stated above. Busy people are making money and will spend some of it to save time and get straight to the content they need. Bored people are not making money and won't pay for Mixergy content because they have all the time in the world to look on torrents or elsewhere.

Your free vs. pay formula:

I believe this current version of it sounds very savvy. You are giving a lot away, and at exactly the right place, while the premium charge is also mostly for the right things. By making new content always free, you make it easy for people to post and discuss in places such as here on HN. By allowing free embedding on blogs and other sites, you encourage conversation elsewhere. This is important and you've obviously thought about it.

Bottom line, let busy people pay to save time and attention. Understand that bored people can't/won't pay, but they may still be loyal fans. Cheers, and good luck with the changes.

It's good that you wrote this Andrew,

I like that it has some creative thought behind it.

I don't think there is much of a business model in directly selling this kind of content, but I may be wrong. I'm also a bit suspicious of attempts to manufacture scarcity, but I am certain there are ways of doing this that are not wrong. You put at risk all the benefits of Free: long tail traffic (I think you could be doing a lot better on search, especially video search), goodwill (or avoiding this strange hate against charging), letting a newcomer dive into mixergy content, cherry-picking interviews they think they'll like and becoming a fan.

All that said, I'm glad you are experimenting. You may discover something really valuabl. As long as you aren't locking yourself into a model, I think it will be worthwhile either way.

* I suggest considering a serious redesign to support this sort of approach and giving it the best chance. I think you may be bending the blog form a little further then it'll go.

...I bet you if I stop charging for it for just 1 week, people would jump on it for the limited time it's free... Suddenly, old is valuable.

Instead, affiliate marketing is the way to go. Try different CPA, PPC, and CPM ad network arrangements with split-testing to see which ones work best for your niche, or choose from 2 or all 3 of those types but try different vendors.

John Chow is a millionaire thanks to his blog, but also thanks to the sales funnel he gets for people who sign up on his site. I have a buddy in London who has a PC support forum with ads on it and he's earned $150,000 in ad revenue alone since 2005. So alternative means to paywalls can be very lucrative if played well.

I read that Andrew says he's all excited about seeing traffic numbers of 10,000. And I'm thinking, "10,000? That's pathetic. It's a good start, but not something as proof that I need to build a paywall."

But don't get me wrong -- sometimes paywalls work really well. For instance, stock investors and daytraders pay for membership sites to get access to daily stock tips from pros. But the numbers, and the unique-ness of the content, justify that paywall.

It's like a having a "sale" every week by making new interviews free.

By putting older content behind a paywall, he's going to drive more traffic to his latest interviews since people would want to get them for free.

I actually like it and I hope it works.

I'm doubtful that I'll end up as a paid subscriber, but my sense is that subscriber revenue is relatively less important compared to the potentially powerful effect of creating the sense of urgency among users.

As others here pointed out, I'm not sure if it's fair to charge all of a sudden without the interviewees knowing about it. And I'm not sure if the quality of your interview would ever change just to keep the paying audience happy!

Maybe do special premium interviews just for paying customers, or write a startup e-book, or get rid of all ads etc.

Also, one of my issues with the interviews is that they're all really really long. I don't have a lot of time in the day, and sitting through an hour+ interview can be hard. I'd suggest mixing up the lengths of interviews and maybe doing short quick interviews where the responder can only respond with one sentence or word.

Anyway keep up the good work.

It's a very slippery slope when you get into charging for media content..

I would say using Mixergy as a springboard into something else, like a product, as Joel used his blog as a springboard for Fogbugz.

You also have a great setup for doing promotional stuff but obviously you need massive numbers to make any real money that way.

Best of luck in any case.

I would think about the option of all videos being free forever but a monthly subscription to access a Mixergy forum, a members area, where people discuss the interviews and talk about the issues they raise.

Use the interviews to create a high quality community that people are willing to pay to join.

Is video advertising not worthwhile for the amount of traffic you get? That would be fairly painless for all parties involved and definitely fine to most users, as we have to deal with it on YouTube and almost all news outlets.

It's not entirely new, of course. I call it the "This American Life" model.

1) What charging model drives the most quality and response from readers? (This seems to be the crux of the argument from your blog)

2) How do I, as a startup founder, get the most from the internet and how do you fit into the picture? If I have to pay for material, why would your material be any better than, say, a few books, free videos, or making friends with other cofounders on a place like HN?

It very well may be that you had 6,900 viewers of the PG interview, but here's the dirty little secret nobody talks about enough over here: there's about 500 tire-kicker, wannabe entrepreneurs for every real one. Probably a lot more. So your "audience" is probably largely consisting of people who like learning as much as they can without actually doing very much. The get a certain cachet out of participating in your interviews.

If that's the case, then I say target those people: work towards more and more famous people and more and more quasi-in-depth interviews. Charge for older material. Set up a "Gold Ring" Entrepreneurs Circle or some other premium brand. This puts you in the startup media business, just like book sellers or the pay-for-feedback guys.

However from my end I think we'll part ways here, at least as far as your paid service goes. Startups have about a thousand different facets and I need to know just enough about each of them but not too much. That means I need instantaneous feedback and a conversation, not an hour-long video from famous person X on how tough it was ten years ago to make their first million. That works great for mass media, but I need to know how to roll out a beta of a social networking site on a limited budget. I need to be able to ask questions about specifics around this topic and I need to know it within the next couple of hours. HN gives me that immediate feedback, and as the amount of material on HN grows, I get all sorts of historical information in easily-searched text format without having to pay anything at all.

Hope that makes some sense to you.

Keep in mind your target audience may be struggling entrepreneurs who are broke (like me).

Or perhaps you're targeting the free site for us, and targeting the paid archive for more well to do folks.

I guess PG better start charging for his essays, then! That is, if he wants us to respect him.