> Like - Zippo lighters. I wonder how long it took Zippo to decide to sell > the flints separately? They're tiny. They cost about a $1.00 for a pack > with one or two in it. And they sell TONS of them. $1.00 isn't much, but > add it up over the umpteen-thousand that are sold, that's a lot of dollars. > Sure, they'd prefer that people go buy another $25.00 Zippo lighter, but > that's not really necessary, when all they need is a new flint. (Yeah, I'm > comparing Zippo flints to something like userpics, but the idea is similar > in nature.)
However, in order to use those flints you have to have a Zippo to begin with. (Sure, someone might have knock-off lighters that can use those flints, but that's not really a problem for Zippo...) It's also not entirely the same because it doesn't cost Zippo anything for you to have your lighter - there's no ongoing cost to them. Versus DW which will have a tangible cost: someone is paying for that bandwidth and disk space! Yes, 75% of people looking at paid accounts might only care about userpics. But if you allow the option to buy only that, you might suddenly find yourself losing a lot of income from the people who bought paid accounts but only wanted that one particular feature and are now downgrading. It's all speculative at this point, agreed, I could be entirely wrong. However, I'd prefer to err on the side of adding functionality than taking it away later, so I think it will be safest for DW to not have this option at launch and then see how things go. If it turns out that we are able to support the site just fine, then we can look at experimenting with an a la carte menu to give people the ability to get only what they want. Denise and I are definitely in support of giving people what they want and not having people feel like they don't have any "great" choices. She has said she wants a la carte before, when we were talking about DW before it was DW. For the users, I want supporting the site to be a really easy decision and allow them to get what they really want. But that has to be balanced with ensuring we have enough breathing room for the site to live and grow. So, we will be a little cautious to begin with, as far as what we offer, and we'll see how it goes. This is the same sort of discussion as with renaming accounts. Do we charge for rename tokens? LJ's reason of "it's hard to rename accounts" is pretty bogus. Logically, if it doesn't cost us anything tangible, it should be free, right? Well, it turns out that rename tokens are a huge source of income for the site. If the difference between DW being available to serve its users and the site going offline is free vs. $10 rename tokens, I'd rather charge for them, personally! But if they start out free and later we have to charge for them? That would be a problem. :) I guess my point is: expect us to start out in known territory - packaged deals, charging for renames, permanent accounts, etc - and then over time innovate in the direction the community feels we should go. Once we have six months of operating costs set aside, we will be more able to play with this sort of thing and find the best way to give you what you want while still keeping the site going. Does that make sense? :) -- Mark Smith / xb95 [EMAIL PROTECTED] _______________________________________________ dw-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.dwscoalition.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dw-discuss
