I would still download a car if I could. 🚗 in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

Counterpoint: When Louis CK (prior to being outed as a sex pest) released one of his comedy specials on his website DRM-free for $5 he became a millionaire almost overnight.

https://boingboing.net/2011/12/22/drm-free-experiment-makes-loui.html

Price point matters, too.

It also jives with early Steam Sales when Valve would cut titles like ~~Left 4 Dead~~ Counter Strike down to 90% off, and they would sell so many digital copies that they were actually making more money off the lower price.

https://www.geekwire.com/2011/experiments-video-game-economics-valves-gabe-newell/

Now we did something where we decided to look at price elasticity. Without making announcements, we varied the price of one of our products. We have Steam so we can watch user behavior in real time. That gives us a useful tool for making experiments which you can’t really do through a lot of other distribution mechanisms. What we saw was that pricing was perfectly elastic. In other words, our gross revenue would remain constant. We thought, hooray, we understand this really well. There’s no way to use price to increase or decrease the size of your business.

But then we did this different experiment where we did a sale. The sale is a highly promoted event that has ancillary media like comic books and movies associated with it. We do a 75 percent price reduction, our Counter-Strike experience tells us that our gross revenue would remain constant. Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40. Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40. Which is completely not predicted by our previous experience with silent price variation. …

Then we decided that all we were really doing was time-shifting revenue. We were moving sales forward from the future. Then when we analyzed that we saw two things that were very surprising. Promotions on the digital channel increased sales at retail at the same time, and increased sales after the sale was finished, which falsified the temporal shifting and channel cannibalization arguments. Essentially, your audience, the people who bought the game, were more effective than traditional promotional tools. So we tried a third-party product to see if we had some artificial home-field advantage. We saw the same pricing phenomenon. Twenty-five percent, 50 percent and 75 percent very reliably generate different increases in gross revenue.

I would still download a car if I could. 🚗 in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago) (3 children)

I'm having trouble finding a link to substantiate it, but I remember in the early 2000's a group of artists having to sue their record labels because of the lawsuits on file-sharing users. The record labels said they were doing it for the artists, but the artists had to sue the record labels to even ever see a penny from the fruits of those lawsuits. The record labels were just pocketing the money for themselves while saying it was "for the artists."

Anyway, long story short is that kind of behavior from the recording industry made me want to give money directly to the artists and cut out these selfish middlemen who did nothing but claimed all the profits.

I would still download a car if I could. 🚗 in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 82 points 12 hours ago* (last edited 12 hours ago) (8 children)

Devil's Advocate: Many pirates would have not paid for access to that media so to say it takes away from the creators profit isn't exactly true since one act of piracy does not equal one lost sale.

Devil's Advocate Part II: There is s significant amount of research that supports the notion that pirates actually spend more money on media than the average person.

I personally am an example of part II. I pirate a lot of music but I refuse to use Spotify because of how little it pays artists and I have also spent significant amounts of money buying music from artists I enjoy via Bandcamp or buying from the artist directly because I know they get a bigger cut of the profits that way.

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Call Before You Dig (lemmy.blahaj.zone)

submitted 13 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

0 comments fedilink

For the first time in a long time, I have a woman asking me if I want to meet for a coffee.

I'd love to, but some fucking moron decided to dig without calling first and busted open a water main for the whole neighborhood and now I can't even take a shower. I am about to go to the store to buy a bunch of jugs of water just so I can flush the toilet.

No timeline on when it's going to be fixed, either.

Sometimes it really feels like the universe just likes to spit in my fucking face and then laugh at me.

Suponjibobu — An Anime Reimagining of SpongeBob SquarePants in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 day ago

This is amazing.

First immigration detainees arrive at Florida center in the Everglades in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 62 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It's clearly to let people die.

Defense Department stops boat renaming project after only changing the one named for Harvey Milk in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 50 points 1 day ago

Nah a non-insignificant amount of the citizens of the country suck too.

Battle of the Cap'ns in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago

That feel when you've been cucked by a ghost.

This place is called Pike Place Market, Seattle. Last year, some people claimed no one will shop here anymore if it's pedestrianized. in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yep, that is indeed what it boils down to because it's a major tourist attraction for people coming in to visit Seattle. So the city councilperson argued that it would reduce people visiting if they had to park far away.

Glad to see they were wrong.

American dominance is not dead, but it is changing — and not for the better in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

We can indeed hope for a multilateral system, but both Russia and China are in positions to potentially exploit the power vacuum. I actually have more faith in China being the more reasonable and safe choice between the two, but they have just as many questionable things their government does as the US does, sadly.

The sad truth is that when there is a power vacuum, other positions of power end up vying for control of the now empty position of power.

Primus - De Anza Jig in c/[email protected]

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

I was always a bit disappointed when they retired primussucks.com and replaced it with primusville or whatever.

I remember seeing them at Ozzfest in 98(?) and the crowd chanting Primus Sucks and Claypool stopping the show for just a moment to say "You heard and saw it here today folks. Primus sucks."

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They Might Be Giants - Your Racist Friend (www.youtube.com)

submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

0 comments fedilink