I host an archive of a free British political satire podcast. As far as I'm aware, my archive is the only place on the 'net that provides downloads for older episodes of this podcast. I receive something short of a terabyte of transfer per month. It's been implicitly approved of by the podcast creators by their linking directly to my archive.
To my surprise, in the two or so years I've been running the site, I've had no fewer than 5 people go out of their way to email me and ask how to give me money. I always redirect them to a charity, as I'm just redistributing someone else's content and the hosting only costs $10/month anyway.
But this reflects what this article describes: people will pay for what they perceive to be a quality product. I really wish the content industries (entertainment, software, literature) would learn this lesson and stop with the DRM nonsense. Make your product easy to use, easy to acquire, and easy to pay for and people simply will pay you for it. It is a different business model than what we've had in the past, and you'll have to get used to the fact that some won't pay you at all, but it can and does work.
It's the future, folks. Time to give up on buggy whips.
To my surprise, in the two or so years I've been running the site, I've had no fewer than 5 people go out of their way to email me and ask how to give me money. I always redirect them to a charity, as I'm just redistributing someone else's content and the hosting only costs $10/month anyway.
But this reflects what this article describes: people will pay for what they perceive to be a quality product. I really wish the content industries (entertainment, software, literature) would learn this lesson and stop with the DRM nonsense. Make your product easy to use, easy to acquire, and easy to pay for and people simply will pay you for it. It is a different business model than what we've had in the past, and you'll have to get used to the fact that some won't pay you at all, but it can and does work.
It's the future, folks. Time to give up on buggy whips.