Service Vs Content, who do you think wins?

[Marian Berghes]

Hello everybody.

In the past couple of months I started to really study continuity methods and stuff to make recurring income.

And I've stumbled upon some different opinions regarding content based recurring income and service/tool based recurring income.

And I must say that at this point service/tool seems potentially more profitable and somewhat less work to put in it on the long run.

With content based, every month you have to give something exciting...something new and interesting if you want the members to stay.

With a service/tool based you can go on for months without adding any new features/apps/tools. And you don't have to worry that next month your members wont like the content and unsubscribe...because they expect the same stuff unless you tell them that you are releasing a new feature.

Now...I didn't test this stuff an everything I'm just saying what I learned from my research and want to hear your opinions.

Do you think something like Small Business Cash Flow Management - Pulse (no affiliate or anything...just showcasing an example) will out-profit and get a better stick rate if it were marketed the same as a content based membership site?

[Branlan17]

I'm not experienced enough to help you answer this but I'm gonna enjoy reading other posts here... lots of good input comes out of these forums

[Marian Berghes]

wth is this suppose to mean?

Originally Posted by russell007

Hello. My Friend name is Ian Rogers. He has been building digital media applications since 1992, dropped out of a Computer Science PhD program to tour with Beastie Boys in 1995, and has been purchased by both AOL and Yahoo! in the ten years since then, with a stint running the new media department for a record label in the middle. Currently he work at Yahoo! Entertainment on Yahoo! Music.
First, a question: How many of you have tried Amazon’s MP3 download service[IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/FSBDIT/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image001.gif[/IMG]?
Back in 1999 I ran Winamp.com for Rob and Justin. Napster came on the scene and we thought, “Wow! There’s a market for MP3s!” We had millions of people using Winamp, visiting Winamp.com for skins and plugins — it was by far the largest community of MP3-lovers. We naively and enthusiastically suggested to labels that we’d be a great place to sell MP3s. The response from the labels at the time was universally, “What’s MP3?” or “Um, no.”
Instead they commenced suing Napster. We were naive to be sure, but we were genuinely surprised by the approach. Suing Napster without offering an alternative just seemed like a denial of fact. Napster didn’t invent the ability to do P2P, it was inherent in TCP/IP. It was like throwing Newton in jail for popularizing the concept of gravity.
Nullsoft subsequently built and prematurely released a program called Gnutella which became the basis for true P2P of the coming years. When Tom Pepper told Time Magazine that Gnutella was for “sharing recipes” he really said it all: This is so much bigger than just sharing music. This is physics. It’s trivial for one person to transfer bits from one person to another. Trivial. Unstoppable. PUT YOUR ENERGY ELSEWHERE, we thought out loud.
He caught a lot of heat from my music industry friends for Nullsoft’s Gnutella leak. In a long and impassioned email in 1999 he wrote to everyone he knew in a band, at a label, or music journalism (whatup, Jay!) and urged them to sell their content to their users in the format they were asking for: MP3. Make it easy, he wrote, and convenience will beat free.

[DAS_Matt]

A successful and useful tool/service with a recurring use is, IMO, a better way to go if you can do it but it is much harder to get the killer idea to come along. If you do then it's a heck of a great income generator for along time but you're also more vulnerable to a better product coming along and killing your goose. Content is generally easier to come by but has more competition generally and is also generally more time intensive. That said you are less likely to have the next great thing come along and hurt your biz too much either.

[waken]

A combination of the two will be interesting but again, this is a subjective question. There are the service / tool model (like Aweber) doing more than great and there are also Content model like Simpleology doing wonderfully well.

So, the best way to determine which model for your chosen niche is to do some testing and analysis.

[Vaan]

Is this a kind of forum poster software??? strange..

Originally Posted by russell007

Hello. My Friend name is Ian Rogers. He has been building digital media applications since 1992, dropped out of a Computer Science PhD program to tour with Beastie Boys in 1995, and has been purchased by both AOL and Yahoo! in the ten years since then, with a stint running the new media department for a record label in the middle. Currently he work at Yahoo! Entertainment on Yahoo! Music.
First, a question: How many of you have tried Amazon’s MP3 download service[IMG]file:///C:/DOCUME%7E1/FSBDIT/LOCALS%7E1/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image001.gif[/IMG]?
Back in 1999 I ran Winamp.com for Rob and Justin. Napster came on the scene and we thought, “Wow! There’s a market for MP3s!” We had millions of people using Winamp, visiting Winamp.com for skins and plugins — it was by far the largest community of MP3-lovers. We naively and enthusiastically suggested to labels that we’d be a great place to sell MP3s. The response from the labels at the time was universally, “What’s MP3?” or “Um, no.”
Instead they commenced suing Napster. We were naive to be sure, but we were genuinely surprised by the approach. Suing Napster without offering an alternative just seemed like a denial of fact. Napster didn’t invent the ability to do P2P, it was inherent in TCP/IP. It was like throwing Newton in jail for popularizing the concept of gravity.
Nullsoft subsequently built and prematurely released a program called Gnutella which became the basis for true P2P of the coming years. When Tom Pepper told Time Magazine that Gnutella was for “sharing recipes” he really said it all: This is so much bigger than just sharing music. This is physics. It’s trivial for one person to transfer bits from one person to another. Trivial. Unstoppable. PUT YOUR ENERGY ELSEWHERE, we thought out loud.
He caught a lot of heat from my music industry friends for Nullsoft’s Gnutella leak. In a long and impassioned email in 1999 he wrote to everyone he knew in a band, at a label, or music journalism (whatup, Jay!) and urged them to sell their content to their users in the format they were asking for: MP3. Make it easy, he wrote, and convenience will beat free.