Micro-monetizing “extra” blog content? Paul presents some real world numbers from his experiment at doing so…

Paul's blog@Wildbunny - Blog micro-transactions – a viable business model?

“If you’re a regular reader, you make have noticed that my technical articles often come with source-code that you can buy if you would like to have a concrete implementation of the ideas I talk about in each article. I’m not sure if this is a new idea or not (probably not) but my decision to try it was based on necessity more than anything else; I’m rapidly running out of money since our game PuzzleShare didn’t take off the way we’d hoped it would (as described here).

The idea

The idea is simple; write a technical blog-post which contains a thorough description of the technique, diagrams, code snippits and working examples directly on the page and then provide the source code for the working examples at a small cost.

I always make sure that the reader has enough information given in the articles that they could implement the techniques described without buying the code, but can save themselves some time if they do – rather like in social games where you can buy more coins instantly instead of slowly earning them!

I think that its very important an article give as much to the reader as possible in terms of value before asking for anything in return; again very like the free-to-play model itself.

Results

I’m always very grateful when other articles reveal actual hard numbers to illustrate business concepts, so now its only fair that I do the same here. …”

As I said in "Physics engines for dummies", I thought Paul’s approach to micro-monetizing his blog post’s “extra” content pretty interesting and bold. I appreciate it even more now that he’s taken the extra step and shared the results of his experiment.

 

Related Past Post XRef:
"Physics engines for dummies"