Today was the day we were planning on introducing our pricing options for Poptiq. We had spent the better part of a month analyzing numbers and working towards a price when we realized we were going about it the wrong way. In this day and age of user generated, crowd sourced, and mass collaboration, it only made sense that we throw away our analysis and instead ask Poptiq users what what they think it’s worth.

Starting today, Poptiq users will receive a video in their carousel that asks them to tell us how they would like Poptiq to be priced.  Should Poptiq be a free ad-supported application, or should it be paid (and if so, how much)?  We’ll gather the feedback for two weeks, then publish the results along with pricing models that reflect what our user’s think it’s worth.  Until then we will continue to offer Poptiq as a free download so new users will have the opportunity to tell us what they think after they have used Poptiq (we send them the video a few days after they start using it).

For those in the industry, perhaps the most interesting and heavily debated aspect of this exercise is the question of how users feel about ad-supported services versus paid services. Industry experts like In-Stat, Convergence Consulting Group, and eMarketer have published research and forecasts for the online and download video markets looking at both ad-supported and paid services. The projections continue to evolve, with no clear winner in sight. The one thing that is for certain is the way people receive and watch video content is changing.

The issue of ad-supported services gets even more serious when the privacy question gets raised. Concerns over privacy and behavioral targeting have been brewing for years, most recently reaching the US congress where Google, Microsoft, facebook, and NebuAd were brought in to discuss their practices on advertising and user privacy. Opinions on how users themselves feel about providing personal and behavioral information in exchange for services on the internet seem to differ greatly. Research by eMarketer suggests consumers are worried about their privacy online - with almost 60% of users surveyed being uncomfortable with advertisers using their online behavior (history) to target ads. Yet Advertising.com in their user survey suggest 94% of users prefer ads over subscriptions (I’m not sure if they asked about possible privacy concerns) The Centre for Democracy and Technology also has online privacy in it’s sights. You only have to look at facebook’s initial launch of Beacon to see how thin the line is for some users.

Privacy aside, the business of ad-supported services remains unproven. Speculation over how successful Google is with monetizing YouTube through advertising is rampant. Yet it seems you can find examples in almost every industry attempting ad-supported models - games, books, video, music, and even food.

So we’re just as interested as everyone else is in knowing how users feel about advertising. Most importantly we want to know what Poptiq users think about our mobile video solution, and what they feel it is worth. If you are a Poptiq user, look for the ‘What’s Poptiq Worth’ video arriving in your carousel and express your opinion in the rating screen. If you’re not a Poptiq user, you have until Oct 8th to get Poptiq and express your point of view. Or you can let us know your thoughts by commenting on this post. Regardless, we want to hear your perspective.

We are living in a user generated, crowd sourced, and mass collaborating world - so stretch those fingers and participate!

Dave.

Tags: ad support, crowd sourced, mass collaboration, paid content, Poptiq, user generated

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 25th, 2008 at 12:38 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.