Money and Finance
- A Solo Home Run: The Slurve Is Trying To Build An Authentic, Profitable Business Around Email
Found via Abnormal Returns. I think there are some good investment-related newsletters out there, but it seems there is still room for some additional high quality ones to come in at some point. If you know of any good ones that I may be missing, send...
- Major Takeaways From A Visit With Warren Buffett
Some notes from University of Western Ontario students' visit with Mr. Buffett on March 31, 2008. The source and a PDF file of these notes can be found HERE. Life Learning Lessons 1. Using the concept of buying or shorting 10% of one of your friends...
- Free! Why $0.00 Is The Future Of Business By Chris Anderson
At the age of 40, King Gillette was a frustrated inventor, a bitter anticapitalist, and a salesman of cork-lined bottle caps. It was 1895, and despite ideas, energy, and wealthy parents, he had little to show for his work. He blamed the evils of market...
- The Intersection Of Dividend Growth Investing And Financial Independence
Tired of working under fluorescent lights day in and day out? Well besides winning the lottery the only way to get away from working 9-5 til 65 is to spend less than you earn and invest the difference. Most of the blogs that I follow are focused...
- Being Called Stingy
Hi Everyone, This is not a new idea, but one that resonates with me. There are quite a few posts within this community talking about being frugal vs. stingy so add this one to the list. Tonight, my wife and I went out for happy hour with...
Money and Finance
Content economics, part 2: payments – By Felix Salmon
I found the excerpt below especially interesting. And remember (warning: shameless plug to follow), you can always support this site by clicking on the SUPPORT VALUE INVESTING WORLD link on the homepage, or by clicking HERE.
The bigger lesson here is that when it comes to persuading your readers to pay you money, it actually helps to be small. There’s an exception for finance, of course, and also for the NYT, which is unique in many ways. But the lesson of Palmer’s talk is that while 25,000 supporters aren’t nearly enough to support a band on a record label, they’re more than enough to support a band on Kickstarter — or, for that matter, to keep an iPad magazine going strong. What’s more, while consumers can be very loyal to brands and to publications, in many ways it’s easier to become loyal to an individual, especially when she has an idiosyncratic and unique voice.
If you want to read The Dish, you can’t get there by going to thedish.com or to thedailydish.com or anything like that: you get there by going to andrewsullivan.com. The person is the site, and when that happens, the readership becomes much more willing to hand over money. Do I want to give Fortune $20 a year so that I can read its magazine articles online? No, I do not — especially when we live in a social world, where if I find a story I love, the first thing I want to do is be able to share it. On the other hand, I’m much more willing to spend $20 a year to support Andrew Sullivan, even if I rarely visit his site, precisely becauseI don’t particularly have to do so, and can read any of his stuff whether I pay him or not.
We’re not talking about micropayments here: those have never taken off, and I doubt they will, at this point. For a long time, people thought that the sheer size of the internet would enable enormous numbers of people to pay negligible sums of money, which would add up to substantial amounts in aggregate. The problem with that was that it’s just too hard to spend money online: the effort involved just isn’t worth it, for sums of a dollar or less.
Instead, the sheer size of the internet enabled the opposite to happen: it enabled smallish numbers of people to pay modest amounts of money, which can add up to just as much in total.
So if you’re a huge publicly-listed corporation, by all means create an elaborate paywall in the hopes that people will decide that they need your content and will just have to pay for it. Every so often, that can work, as it has at the FT and the NYT. But frankly I don’t think those examples are particularly replicable: they’re both sui generisin many ways. Instead, it seems to me, the most promising aspect of content payments is at the other end of the spectrum. Build up a relationship with your readers, in large part by giving your content away for free; ask for money with pride and shamelessness; and place no cap on how much you let your readers spend. Give them the opportunity, and you might be very surprised at what they’re willing to buy.
- A Solo Home Run: The Slurve Is Trying To Build An Authentic, Profitable Business Around Email
Found via Abnormal Returns. I think there are some good investment-related newsletters out there, but it seems there is still room for some additional high quality ones to come in at some point. If you know of any good ones that I may be missing, send...
- Major Takeaways From A Visit With Warren Buffett
Some notes from University of Western Ontario students' visit with Mr. Buffett on March 31, 2008. The source and a PDF file of these notes can be found HERE. Life Learning Lessons 1. Using the concept of buying or shorting 10% of one of your friends...
- Free! Why $0.00 Is The Future Of Business By Chris Anderson
At the age of 40, King Gillette was a frustrated inventor, a bitter anticapitalist, and a salesman of cork-lined bottle caps. It was 1895, and despite ideas, energy, and wealthy parents, he had little to show for his work. He blamed the evils of market...
- The Intersection Of Dividend Growth Investing And Financial Independence
Tired of working under fluorescent lights day in and day out? Well besides winning the lottery the only way to get away from working 9-5 til 65 is to spend less than you earn and invest the difference. Most of the blogs that I follow are focused...
- Being Called Stingy
Hi Everyone, This is not a new idea, but one that resonates with me. There are quite a few posts within this community talking about being frugal vs. stingy so add this one to the list. Tonight, my wife and I went out for happy hour with...