$19,233.89 & 147,041 Page Views From One eBay Listing Selling Public Domain Material

I like passe just fine if I can make it work. I'll leave it to others to keep chasing the latest thing.

I doubt they will be used.
They buy it as an antique.
Meharis

Any U.S. government publication is Public Domain, too!

Really? What do you find hard about it?

I disagree. He's charging $3.50 for shipping. Shipping is only $1.75. They are profiting close to 20k just from that listing.

This person has positioned themselves well. Between their ebay username and the tags they are using for people to find the sales page, they have done an excellent job at turning jam recipes into a survival item for folks looking for off the grid solutions.

The original CD is priced with shipping to bring in about 9.50 US a sale. I don't know the ins and outs of EBay fees but I had read that recently they changed their fee structure. I don't really how it changed because I don't know what it was like before.

The sale page is clearly labeled for education and informational purposes only. And the only thing that is discount price is the shipping on additional units.

This is a really well positioned product. Thanks again Efrain.

shhhh do not let these secrets out LOL.

There is public domain stuff coming out every day taht can make you very rich.

Hi Efrain,

I'm actually veering on the side of fluffythewondercat.

I had a business like this on ebay nearly a decade ago. I still promote ebay as an affiliate.

What's more important is to try and see how many people are wasting time and money trying to make a success of a business like this and compare that with what you know about this person who appears to have made a success of it.

It's too simplistic to point to one example where no one has the exact details of their earnings.

The same thing applies to any other one off example - facebook, ebay themselves, twitter. Just because these websites have succeeded does not mean that everyone else can (or should) model those businesses purely on that basis. Just because Joe Bloggs won $100m on the lottery does not mean that we should all throw money and time at it and not allowing anyone to make that point is not helpful.

There is always something to learn and I'm not suggesting that posts like this are not interesting, helpful or useful. But as you may have noticed, I'm also a proponent of examining the negatives as well as the positives. To refuse to allow any negative questioning of a theory is not helpful - those negative questions could be just as valid, interesting and useful as positive comments (if not more.)

This is a lame complaint. It gets used way too often. I'll explain further.

If you hired an investment advisor, would you adopt the same rules? Say you said to them, 'I've found this possible investment and I think it's a winner, what do you think?' And they replied, 'don't touch it. It's too risky.' Would you find a different advisor who only said positive things? That would be financial suicide.

Well there is a correlation between investment advice and what we talk about here. People invest their time, money, energy and hopes and dreams on what they learn here, therefore there has to be a grown-up attitude towards both positive and negative comments, particularly if the provider is trying to help and be constructive, otherwise all of the posts become useless if no one is allowed to offer what you conceive to be negative comments.

See above.

The crux of this is that it's a product that has very low seller input. There's not a lot of creativity involved. Even if someone cannot write to save their life, they can attempt to sell PD. Therefore, it's one of those ideas where the competition level is raised, because the easier and more simple something is to do, the higher the level of competition (generally) because there's a lower barrier to entry.

People who don't know how to build and host websites and drive traffic sell digital products on ebay because ebay does that for them, and provides a marketplace/traffic - and they take their cut for it, therefore the margins are lower.

This is an example of being honest and realistic, or you can choose to view it as an example of negativity if that suits you. It's actually a negative trait to see negativity somewhere where there may not necessarily be any.

I invite intelligent constructive criticism of anything I say here (or elsewhere), because I learn from it. To disallow this would hinder my learning. Other peoples opinions are very valuable.

Hope this helps.

Hi Efrain,

I think it may have been a little too direct (for want of a better word) and on that basis was not likely to gain a positive response. It was a little bit incendiary

Thanks for the reply, the compliment and for reading and comprehending what my point was.

In the listing posted here, there is no mention of PD material that I could see.

But think of it this way: if you are looking for canning recipes and find them in that ebay listing, are you gonna care that they are "public domain"? How many people even know what that is? Are you going to forget the canning recipes and go find them yourself? I don't think many people know how to do that.

I mean, people buy Dickens and Shakespeare books every day in bookstores.

Hi JamieD87,

LINK

I don't know, but if you go back and click directly on the item linked in the OP, there's a section on the right side of the page that says "Other Item Info," and at the bottom there's a History tab that currently says "3,698 sold." You can click on that and it shows you that it's selling several copies every day, including four today so far.

Since its public domain there is nothing stopping folks from doing this - but at some point it reaches a point of diminishing returns - you're either losing money or making very little. If you are not making a decent amount what's the point - as someone else said if you can make more working at McDonalds why go through such a hassle.

The goal is to find a hungry market(Niche) and target your material to them.

Thanks to Efrain for a good post and to all the others for pointing out the good and possible bad.

best,
--Jack


--Jack

Sure... but my guess is that people with a survivalist
mindset who are looking for old canning recipes probably
aren't looking to start a business selling them.

Wow - lots of stuff to think about here !
I love this country !!

Hi Efrain Hernandez,

Great post, on such a simple business model and the proof is easy to see!

Regards

Jack

You better make it look a little bit professional - you want to get positive feedback, right?

An other product this ebayer sells comes with a printed paper label. You could also print directly on some CD/DVD.

Bump on this. Apparently the seller's listing has ended and doesn't have any other listings. This seems to be recent as of today.

Old link from OP still works.

Fwtw, I used to sell software and informational ebooks on ebay via digital downloads back when they allowed it. They were all public domain too. I was banking 3k profit a month.

It started to not be profitable as competition was lowering prices and even one of my customers resold my package, for $1.99 where I was selling $7.99. Finally got out of it after ebay killed digital delivery and required CD shipping. There is NO way you can make money with $1.99 CDs.

But given this thread, I'm gonna have to look back on this.