Ryan McGinnis
EF5
Originally posted by David Wolfson
Ryan, your reaction is understandable, and why I posted what I did in a roundabout way. Psychologically it looks like a \"price increase\". The way I prefer to look at it is that the early signers took advantage of a very good deal. Tim isn't getting rich off CH, for sure. He needs enough revenue from it to justify his investments of money and time. For most of two months Tim is pretty tied down serving CH subscribers.
Well, to be empirical, it doesn't just look like a price increase, it is a price increase. The product was announced weeks ago as having a certain price. Now the price is almost double. You can rationalize that what was happening before was a sale, but it wasn't marked as a sale, nor was it explained that it was a limited-time-only offer.
Again, I'm trying hard not to sound like a whiner. I think it's a-okay that Tim bumped his prices, and I wish him success, as his work is great. But I don't know how this helps the product in the long term. I also like to read The New Yorker. If they suddenly started charging, out of the blue, $300 a year to subscribe, I'd probably do without. Your subscribers dry up and you're SOL. The less people who subscribe, the less dough you make. What's unique about e-publishing is that it's not significantly harder to e-publish canned info to 10,000 people than it is to e-publish canned info to 10 people. Each new subscriber requires almost zero new overhead, and so after your initial overhead is covered, each subscription is pure profit. Maybe the storm-chaser market is too small and specialized to work on the normal subscription model. Tim likely knows way more about this than I do, since I'm not the guy running his business.