Re: Will They Pay?

From: Brandi Jasmine <brandi_at_brandijasmine.com>
Date: Thu 17 May 2001 15:28:50 -0500

MICHAEL MARTINEZ <Michael_at_xenite.org> WROTE:

>Actually, the reality is that MOST people currently
>refuse to pay, according to the latest research.

The key is to find out just what they will pay for as
well as the conditions that contribute to that
willingness.

>Well, if your target audience is the American surfing
>public, you can't even expect more than 10% to pay
>for porn (which I assume is the highest grossing
>content, but I don't have anything on which to base
>that assumption).

I'm no expert on porn (and who would admit it here
if they were? <g>), but you can get it on the Usenet
free of charge, and the industry is suffering from
legal crackdowns, crackdowns from the credit card
companies - it's a sector under the start of some
major transitions. It may be easier to make money
there but there are no guarantees of success. The
fundamentals - having a niche, advertising, and
ensuring a smooth customer experience are as critical
there as they are anywhere else.

>"The message that comes across from the conclusions
>of this meeting is that the companies best placed to
>succeed in the new media world are those that have
>already succeeded in the hard print world."
>
>This seems to exclude the vast majority of business
>sites.

Are business sites really in the business of making
money from their content? Most of them have content
there to enhance a brand or to drive traffic to their
shopping carts, so it's not an issue for them.

>Quality of content, newsworthiness, they don't really
>pay the bills. Most people are willing to wait until
>the free sites pick it up. Heck, you can get almost

You know the song from "Gypsy"? ... "You gotta get a gimmick"?

>anything spidered by Google from their cache, including
>the full text of many PDF files now (without having to
>load up the Adobe reader). It's true that Google will
>honor certain exclusion conventions, but most sites
>don't include them. You pretty much have to password-
>protect directories on your site to keep the spiders
>from republishing your content.

That's not hard. There are tons of free password-
protecting scripts.

You can also add the following tag to the header of
page you don't want indexed:

<meta http-equiv="robots" content="noindex">

>And most businesses, unlike the Wall Street Journal,
>cannot afford to keep their content out of the major
>search engines.

There is a simple solution for that too.

Create an intro page to the valuable PDF (chances are
that already exists).

DON'T put the
<meta http-equiv="robots" content="noindex"> tag on
the index or referring page for the directory holding
these files. To my knowledge the robots can only index
HTML files anyway. If that's not true, put them in a
password-protected subdirectory.

---

Brandi Jasmine
Writer, Digital Photographer, Illustrator
        www.brandijasmine.com
www.astrology.ca - www.twostar.com
      brandi_at_brandijasmine.com



Received on Thu May 17 2001 - 15:28:50 CDT