D Consortium as Book / App Publisher... ?

[Joakim via Digitalmars-d]

On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 17:29:56 UTC, Bubbasaur wrote:
> On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 17:01:17 UTC, Joakim wrote:
>> The problem is ads make no money for the vast majority of 
>> writers, so they have to write a book and sell it to make 
>> writing worth their time.  This is why you have to pay for 
>> almost all the D books, with free online books like Ali's the 
>> rare exception to the rule.
>
> I see, but I thought the money was for the D 
> Consortium/Organization.

If there's almost no money coming in, does it matter where that 
pittance goes? ;) I wasn't talking about the D foundation, but a 
paid blog that would get writers to produce good articles online.

> Anyway it's really a big problem, if you see, currently sites 
> like: vice, verge, medium etc. They all work with ads, every 
> time you see a "click bait" title.

The dirty little secret is that those sites make little to no 
money, relying on funding from dumb VCs before they go out of 
business, like the Gigaom tech blog.  Vice has done well, and 
looking up why now, I see it's because they mostly focus on video 
and made deals with TV channels and cable companies, not exactly 
replicable for most writers.

The best way to illustrate how inadequate ads are is this chart, 
that shows what happened to US newspaper ad revenue over the last 
15 years:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Naa_newspaper_ad_revenue.svg

That little blue squib at the bottom, that's online ads.  
Newspaper revenue used to be 80% from ads, now they're all 
putting up paid subscription banners, because ads just don't work 
for most sites online.

> I remember paying $50 ~ $80 for Programming books, but that 
> were the old times, today with ebooks and piracy things are bad.

Ebooks definitely lower costs, so they _should_ be cheaper.  As 
for piracy, that genie is out of the bottle, all you can do is 
mitigate it.  But paid books still sell well, and that's only 
because of the complete lack of imagination of people to try paid 
online models, such as paid blogs.

On Tuesday, 22 December 2015 at 17:55:16 UTC, Jakob Jenkov wrote:
>> It is all beyond idiotic: it is amazing how long antiquated 
>> ideas stick around, only because people cannot imagine 
>> anything else.
>
> I agree 100%. I published 4 books for Amazon Kindle, then 
> stopped for exactly this reason. You can do so much more 
> advanced stuff on the web than in an ebook.
>
> I run http://tutorials.jenkov.com which has a good bit above 1 
> million page views a month. I do a few videos too. I just 
> publish as I write. I earn a bit of money from the ads, but 
> it's not that much money. The % of people browsing with ad 
> blockers is rising.

Wow, that's pretty good traffic.  I've been reading your IAP/ION 
spec and was surprised how clearly it's written, guess that's why.

> How would a paid blog work? Subscription? Texts hidden behind a 
> pay wall? Hard to get it into the search engines then...

Paywall for 80% of the posts, with the remaining free to sample, 
and the reader puts in $5-10 and gets charged 5-25 cents from 
that balance per post clicked on.  That metered model is much 
better than subscriptions.  If I don't read any posts for two 
months, I don't get charged any money from my balance.  There are 
ways to get content behind a paywall indexed, paid sites like the 
WSJ do it.