Quote:
Originally posted by Thorin
This dramatically changes the nature of paysites using it. Before a user would pay $20 or $30 to have full access to the material, I doubt there were many surfers out there who weren't saving at least *some* of it from each site. They expected it, they wanted it -- it's what they paid for right? (this excludes people who make a habbit of stealing all the content they can tho) With DRM that expires after a set time the user is no longer paying for the same thing. Now they pay only to view it. Can you justify that the same content is worth the same fee if thier ability to use it is crippled. Can a surfer still justify paying the same membership fee if they know they get nothing once thier membership is over?
Basically this changes the product. Which will change prices, sales, marketing etc.
I'm not saying this is wholly bad, but it's not as simple as "everything is the way it was, but now my content won't get stolen & used inappropriately" It changes *everything* about the paysite model.
|
Thorin,
Good point. In fact they've already done studies on this and the answer is actually yes and no. It was done with music and they issued a small quantity of DRM'ed music for $5 per CD against a Non-DRM CD for $16 that was not restricted. The restricted content outsold the unrestricted by 20 to 1. As far as what the end user expects, the ability to host extremely large volumes of content on a site without the fear of a user sucking down large amounts of bandwidth, give the end user much greater access to content while the webmaster has the freedom to offer that content while staying cost effective. Where the success is most prevalent with DRM users in the development of NEW business models.
Randall