Feedback needed!
Wednesday, September 23, 2009 at 1:18AM UPDATE #2: Polls closed! Thank you for your input! More news soon.
Please help me in my planning for the upcoming MonoTouch screencast series. Screencasts will be the same (or better!) high quality as the "Getting Started With MonoTouch" screencast. The goal of the series will be to take the viewer through all aspects of iPhone development and provide comprehensive training for this development framework.
To keep the quality at this level and produce the number of screencasts that will be needed to cover all of the topics that need to be covered, these screencasts will not all be able to be free. That is where I need your feedback. Please submit your answers to the following polls to help me make some pricing decisions! Your input will help make this training series successful.
Update:
Some thoughts so far based on the results:
Someone voted that the price per screencast should be $1. That would not work at all. A lot if time goes into preparing a screencast the quality of the Getting Started screencast and I'm aiming for them to be even better than that. Please had a look at the samples at http://peepcode.com for an example of another screencast site. Note that he charges $9 and has been very sucessful.
I understand that this is the Internet and people want free or dirt cheap, but please when answering select the *most* you would pay for high quality content.
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Reader Comments (8)
Looking forward to more MonoTouch screencasts! Keep up the good work.
I would like to see some form of subscription plan, where I can view the screencasts both online and offline (on the road, disconnected scenarios etc), as both perspectives have their strengths.
IMO $5,- to $8,- /month with an update every two weeks or so would be a reasonable price/frequency.
Some thoughts so far based on the results:
Someone voted that the price per screencast should be $1. That would not work at all. A lot if time goes into preparing a screencast the quality of the Getting Started screencast and I'm aiming for them to be even better than that. Please had a look at the samples at http://peepcode.com for an example of another screencast site. Note that he charges $9 and has been very sucessful.
I understand that this is the Internet and people want free or dirt cheap, but please when answering select the *most* you would pay for high quality content.
Having looked at http://peepcode.com , I am left unsure what success means. If that correlates to cornering a section of the market and pricing according ( read : high ) then yes I agree . But that site is a collection of lessons that would equate to a publishing business model where a book costs : $400 . I'm implying that an average programming book contains 40 sections, and each video would relate to a section of a book .
All in all, the quality to noise ration in iPhone dev world is about to get real bad : Mono , ActionScript , Obj-C ... plus any new contenders that might pop up in the near future . With that, you can't expect to continue on with the above business model . At least , I would hope not .
What I would like to see , and it's contingent on your costs : A subscription based model that rewards your steady cients where it doesn't cost us 8x price of a published book to get a book's worth of content . And a separate per / video model where someone can get a screencast for $5 - $10 a pop .
@Arek:
Thank you for your comments. I definitely agree with a lot of what you are saying. The good news is that the plan is a bit more broad that it was when I initially made these posts. My first video series (and it will be an on-going one for sure after the initial videos) will be about MonoTouch. But, the domain name/company I am seeking to create will be more general in nature and have videos for a wider range of topics.
Still working on the pricing, but I am definitely still considering a subscription model.
Are you going to be doing Video tutorials?
@Lee Yes, coming soon.
I'd drop $10/month for high quality , 1-2 lessons per month.
I'd pay $5 for a good screencast. I would expect it to be 45+ minutes and cover topics not easily found by using a search engine. I'd pay more once I've seen a couple and if I found them worth while.