27
Jan
2011
Oversaturated Forums
Online forums are a thing of the past for most people now. There’s a few slow ones I still hang around once every month or so but I don’t keep up on any forums like I used to.
But my problem with trying to keep up with forums these days is that sometimes they are incredibly fast paced. A topic can balloon into several pages in less than an hour and then be basically done. Or go onto several hundred pages in weeks which you can never catch up on.
So you have basically two options: mark all as read every once in a while, or start to ignore the forums. I started with the first and then moved on to the second.
Now my addiction is RSS and twitter, both of which I can more easily control the flow of. Want more? Add a follower or a feed. Want less? Drop a few. I only wish there was a way to not have duplicate RSS items about the same news story from separate sources. I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen an Apple story reported on by 10 different feeds with no new information after the first.
2
Nov
2010
The Music Industry is Doing It Wrong
So they’re online. They’re finally (mostly?) online. But they still whine and complain about sales. The problem is they aren’t taking advantage of the great differences in selling online.
What do I mean? Sales and bundles. Look at what Valve has done with Steam. Valve does basically 4 things with products to make them sell better.
- 10% off on pre-orders or new products. Little bit of a discount for new items let’s them stand apart from older products and gives a little incentive to buy them.
- 4 for 3 package deals or buy 4, get 25% off. Link people together, get more sales from people who sometimes wouldn’t have bought it otherwise.
- Multiple product bundles. Things like a discography or similar artists for a larger discount.
- HUGE HOLIDAY SALES! Steam has holiday sales so popular people complain about buying things just because they are so cheap, even if they have no intention of playing it.
The point of all these sales? To sell people things they might not want, but in such a convincing way that they can’t help but do it. Another part of all these sales is to only do them on whole albums, selling all the filler songs that are generally lackluster.
The differences between music and games is actually better for music sales as well. People become bored of music much sooner than they become bored of games. People don’t (usually, minus one old roommate) become obsessed with music and not listen to anything else like they do with games.
Many people have vast libraries of music. Thousands of songs. You can’t expect people to pay $0.99 at a time to spend a thousands of dollars on a library of that size.
So that’s it. You now have direct control over the price of items. The cost of selling an item has gone significantly down. (transport, packaging, materials? hah!)
Use it.
6
Dec
2009
99 Steam Games
I have 99 steam games. That is significantly larger than I have physical games. There are two reasons for that:
- Steam offers me many, many deals, especially on older but still relevant games.
- Steam offers large packs of games at discounted prices.
I began using steam back in 2004 when they were throwing around Half-Life 2 with every video card, but before it came out you could play the older games. And a $10 upgrade got me Day of Defeat: Source and I could keep the back catalog. $10 for Half-Life and all associated mods PLUS a new game that I was waiting for? Sign me up. Read the rest of this entry »
13
Jun
2009
Facebook.com shortened URLs
So I missed out on facebook.com/apocrypha. Although I wouldn’t have actually taken it, I’d rather know that it is free than have some girl dressed as sailor moon with it.
I got my own name though, and that’s very nice. Favourites so far are facebook.com/Default.aspx and www.facebook.com/index.aspx. Many that I expected to be gone are still not taken, like facebook.com/Satan but I have a feeling those are disallowed somehow.
I also know a bunch of people who have yet to jump on this at all, get on that internet friends!