[jacquesm]

Paying for information is dependent on the value of the information to an individual or corporation, if you want people to pay for information then you can look at angles such as scarcity, quality, return on investment, entertainment value and so on.

There is such a thing as the 'information economy', so clearly information has value but what that value is highly depends on the information itself.

Next weeks lottery numbers are information, they're worth gold today but nothing two weeks from now.

[karsa]

Don't you feel that with video, the reason it has been traditionally poor at converting or monetizing is because the systems used so far have generally been pay walls.

Pay walls eliminate customers because its like anything what you don't know you don't miss.

This new concept however, works much like real world interactions where the consumer can get hooked on the content before having to pay.

I think this is a fundamental shift from Pay walls...

[jacquesm]

The way most video sites seem to solve this is by adding advertising at the beginning of the clip.

It's a high nuisance way of creating money but it does seem to work.

[karsa]

We have seen many large companies fail who relied solely on ads: Veoh, Stage6, even Google video failed to make money from ads!

The problem with ads is the cpm is always so low on such content and the bandwidth so high, it was this problem which led me to develop the general concept for my own http://www.documentary-film.net which was always on the brink of closure until I implemented this concept.

It worked so well that sales increased over 90% and I was able to afford a proper CDN (highwinds) to deliver the content.

After this I didn't think more about it until Andrew Warner @ Mixergy mentioned about charging for his content and I told him that introducing a pay wall (as he planed) would result in viewings going to zero, instead I told him to develop something like I had with doc-film-net.

Of course his response was, where's the plug in for that?

That's when I had the aha moment and built it for him and anyone else who is in the same boat. There's a ton of tech involved to achieve this feature and its way out of depth for the average content producer.