Ask HN: how would you monetize Learnivore.com ? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: how would you monetize Learnivore.com ?

I'm looking for useful (for the users) ways to monetize http://learnivore.com (ruby/rails screencasts aggregator I'm running).

The goal isn't to make huge loads of money, rather to pay the hosting and a bit of the time I spend maintaining and finding content for the site.

I tried various options (pledgie, amazon, affiliation through interesting ebooks) but none really worked out.

Would you have any suggestion ?

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People part with their money when you add significant value (solve a tough problem or create lots of delight). The value of Learnivore is that it collects programming screencasts into one place, which is valuable but not that valuable. It's not creating enough value that you could charge directly for it.

In order to make good money, you'd have to view the screencast aggregation as your marketing, not your product. You'd have to invent another product to go along with this.

Ads are a weak example of this. Ads would be about connecting programmers with businesses serving programmers, which you can see is a different product than screencasts.

Another product could be consulting. This site could generate leads for consulting gigs, which would give you more money in one hour than you can probably make in a month with ads.

Well, it's obvious that people are making money off of screencasting. If you're referring people to them so they can make sales then you should be taking a cut of that.

Offer a 'featured screencast of the day' which takes prominent place on your site.

Yup, I'm in touch with javery for this exactly. Thanks!

Thanks for the comment. I agree with pretty much everything you wrote! I definitely don't intend to charge for the access, clearly.

I thought about creating screencasts that would be promoted through Learnivore, but that's a lot of work to get started and I already have fairly large projects on the back-burner.

On the consulting gigs: the thing is that I don't have much spare time, so I'd rather avoid generating leads currently :) But I will save the idea for later if things change!

Anyway - thanks for the food for thoughts!

There's no rule that says you have to generate leads for yourself - you could probably turn some money referring leads to other developers who you rate highly enough to recommend.

That's why I really like HN - plenty of people with variety of perspectives. Thanks a lot for this new idea!

Hi Techiferous. I love your reply. I'm looking to learn more about Monetization. It sounds like you know a great deal. Can you suggest some sites or books I should look in to?

Hi, cmartin. I don't know a great deal about monetization, just some basic stuff. I'm in the process of reading "The Entrepreneur´s Guide to Customer Development for Tech Startups" available at http://custdev.com which has some good, solid advice for bringing a product to market. It doesn't talk a lot about monetization, but reading it may help you generate your own good, grounded monetization ideas.

(With the IP owners permission...)

Convert the screencasts into a standard format via Hey!Watch or Encoding.com, make them available for offline content on mobile devices. Charge for that, give a kickback to the IP owner.

A couple of people contacted me about that. It would be probably doable for "free" content, delivered for a low-cost for offline watching via an iphone app with in-app purchase, then split 50/50 between learnivore and the author.

I would definitely ask IP owners first, just like I did before adding any content on the site.

Thanks for the suggestion!

I know I would pay to have some of our screencasts from TekPub.com show up on the site in some sort of featured section (ideally inline with the rest of the content but clearly marked as sponsored). Drop me a line and we can work something out. (email is in profile)

Will contact you - thanks!

Just sent you an email.

You attract rails programmers? The obvious monetization strategy there is a jobs site. Either start one (specific for rails), or link to one that pays referral fees.

Most likely though, you should probably consider this a labor of love.

A job site is a good idea too, I didn't thought about that.

This specific site is definitely a labor of love :)

+1 for the job site suggestion.

Just contact some startup job sites and offer them a deal. Don't go with freelance project listing sites. Most people know that it's tough competition on those type of sites.

Link with sites that just serve job listings. ex: startuply and others.

On another note, allow those who make paid screencasts to advertise on your site. integrate some kind of reddit-type self serve ads that show up on specific screencast's pages. Would be cool.

ex: I make ActiveRecord screencasts so i choose some pages on your site which display activerecord screencasts and choose to display my ads only on those pages :) this way you show related content too :)

Very nice idea, again. I will investigate both, thank you!

Approach the screencast owners about setting up affiliate programs. Since they have 96% margins or so, it really makes sense for them to pay 20% of the purchase price to you if you can demonstrably drive converting traffic.

When you pay your authors your margins are closer to 45%.

Become an amazon affiliate and link to highly recommended programming/math books.

That's a good idea I believe - I could add a hand-picked book section, where each book would be an item like the current screencast.. Thanks!

Don't get too excited about that idea, if Stackoverflow's experience is anything to rely on:

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/11/our-amazon-advertising...

However, your experiences might be a bit difference since people going to watch screencasts are more likely to be looking for a focused instruction than people going to Stackoverflow, so maybe these people would buy books. It's worth a try, but I wouldn't invest a lot of effort in it.

They also mention the Adsense problem on technical sites that you refer to elsewhere in this post.

Link: http://learnivore.com

You should start making your own screencasts and sell them alongside the others. Your brand is already established, you'll have seen enough screencasts to know what works and you can identify gaps in the market. If you put an open poll on there you can get feedback from people visiting the site about what they want to buy, but isn't there. And you can share that with other screencasts producers. If nobody else steps up, you can make and sell the most popular suggestions.

You don't even have to make the screencasts, you can pay others and you just sell them.

You need to sell your ads directly to advertisers. 125 x 125 ads on the sidebar would be a good option for you. Another thing to consider would be making sticky, sponsored post on the homepage.

I will think about that. The specific thing about this site is that there is a lot more people using it via RSS and Twitter than via the site.

I think I could offer ads spot in the RSS for one month in all published screencasts, for instance.

if any given screencast you link to does something they charge for, you could arrange with them to get an affiliate kickback fee

That would be lovely...

Unfortunately none of the existing publishers on the site run an affiliate program.

why no adsense?

I never tried on this specific site, but on other sites I found that the click rate is so low it's not worth it. Maybe I should give it a try though. Thanks for the suggestion.

Your hosting costs are probably very low. Since you're looking just to cover expenditures and maybe make a little pocket money, AdSense might suffice.

I already tried adsense on programming related sites. With a CTR of about 1/10000, I'd likely make 0.5$ per month (plus adsense is not really sexy :-)).

But why not - I'll think about it.

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