Could you be worth less than one dollar a month to StupidVideo? The site offers a premium service that allows you to enjoy its videos ad-free for 99 cents a month (on annual subscription, and it eliminates streaming ads only).
This begs the question- is that what it’s worth to a viewer to skip ad (customer-value pricing), or is that an economic decision (the average visitor consumes so few videos that StupidVideo would rather a dollar than the ad revenue they could make off that visitor’s eyeballs?
Grant- it might simply be a gimmick to provide ad-sensitive viewers and garner some modest revenue from those viewers that are so opposed to ads that they’d go elsewhere otherwise. Certainly the approach is unique in the online-video arena. I’m surprised more sites don’t have a pay-for-no-ad model, but quite curious how they’d price it. After all, an active site visitor to YouTube might watch a few dozen videos in a day. YouTube would be foolish to let that visitor buy their way out of ads unless the customer fee offset the anticipated ad revenue (or, again, you were just afraid they’d go elsewhere if ads persist).
I think it depends on the format the site is using for ads. The more intrusive, the more people might pay to avoid them – in theory, assuming people would be willing to pay at all. Also, I find the alternatives above interesting – 99 cents per month if you pay for a whole year, $1.99 per month if you pay per month. I’m guessing most people would be more likely to choose the latter alternative because they make the decision on the fly and don’t know whether they’ll even be interested in the site in a year, but what do I know? You’re the marketing whiz.
Sometimes Kein I wonder if you read anything I write here? 😉
I would pay, like 1000s of others who paid when yahoo put ads on geocities. Any good idea is going to be free or cheap in the beginning, con men call it the hook, advertisers call it PR. This is exactly how Microsoft became Microsoft. I’m betting google/youtube will eventually sell ad free subscriptions too – it’s dedicated cash, money in the bank and once people rely on it the price will go up up up. In the last year Skypes did exactly that.
Still waiting for Slater to get his new business going so I can watch him sell it for his first billion 😉
Me, too.