Would anyone else stuck with a bunch of subscriptions on Authorize.net like to see Stripe come up with an easy way to transition over? That would be incredible.
Note to self: it's as simple as creating the most popular YouTube video of all time. Done and done. Say you're independent and have a decent hit -- 100,000 views. Earnings: $870.
100,000 views isn't much. I think my silly videos of Sid Meier's Railroads[1][2] have more than that.
These are things I put together in a day and edited in windows movie maker. When youtube offered adding ads I ignored them thinking it would never amount to anything. At $8.7 ECPM I feel absurd having skipped the chance!
For an independent band 1k means vital equipment and capital to sell fan goods. For a "Let's play" gamer it means a better microphone and subsidizes the cost of games.
Many large websites run on rates far lower, and those have to provide their own traffic.
>These are things I put together in a day and edited in windows movie maker. When youtube offered adding ads I ignored them thinking it would never amount to anything. At $8.7 ECPM I feel absurd having skipped the chance!
Presumably, you would not be able to show ads on those videos because they use IP you don't have the rights to. They're popular (again, presumably) because people search for footage of those copyright games and enjoy the first copyright music track. It's fairly easy to put something together "in a day" that becomes popular when you're not constricted by the rules of copyright and can piggyback on the popularity of existing content. I'm not criticizing - I have a viral video on youtube that's within spitting distance of a million views, but I would never be able to show ads on it because I don't have permission to use the footage or the music.
And yes, it seems that presently most video games companies generally turn a blind eye to people posting footage from their games. But you'd be foolhardy indeed to start to rely on advertising revenue that was built entirely on the goodwill of a diverse group of for-profit companies. There are a host of semi- and fully-professional video game personalities whose livelihood could be shut down overnight if a few companies decided to enforce their copyrights.
This view on pivoting reflects the Groupon pivot fallacy where you just dramatically change your business model and, poof, you're a billionaire.
What we've found to be a more tolerable, easy-to-execute view on pivoting is to say, we know what general problem we're focused on solving, but we don't know exactly how to solve it.
Pivots are therefore continual and small. We probe in various directions hypothesizing that a certain approach might help us make headway. Among other things, lowering the stakes and testing in small, bite-sized pieces will make it much easier to sell a new idea to your team.
The sentiment in this post reflects a larger frustration with Malcolm Gladwell's oversimplified, reductionist writing in which complex systems are dumbed down into highly marketable archetypes.
