Should We Sell Articles As PDFs?
What if we made your articles available for sale to our million daily visitors as an instant PDF download?
4 Questions for Your Consideration:
- How much should we charge for a PDF article download? For example, iTunes charges 99¢ to $1.29 per song or $1-10 for an app.
- How should licensing be handled? Should the buyer be given unlimited rights with the PDF or different kinds of license rights such as a single use PDF, unlimited printing rights PDF, electronic re-distribution rights, electronic re-publishing rights?
- How should the profit be split between the Author (you) and EzineArticles?
- Other considerations/options we should consider?
We’ve already determined that PayPal would have to be the payment method and there would have to be a minimum payout amount to justify the accounting. In addition, the only way this would work is if every article was available for sale as a PDF.
Right now, our current TOS does not allow the commercial use of your articles in printed form. In other words, it’s not okay to print an article and distribute 100 copies to people coming to your seminar or to redistribute the PDF to others. This new product would essentially enable commercial use of your articles in a pay-for-PDF model.
Example of offline uses that a company might use a PDF of your article to do:
- Handout to give seminar/workshop attendees more value
- Handout to employees or vendors to reinforce ideas
- Handout to customers to add value
- Handout to give investors confidence that your business model makes sense
Your answers to the above questions are vital to determining not only if we proceed with this possibility, but how to best accomplish it.
Please submit your responses as comments to this Blog post. And feel free to simply number your answers in reference to each particular question.
Then, as always, get back to submitting another set of high-quality, original articles. Who knows, someday they may be worth more than just traffic and credibility boosts … perhaps money in the bank! :)
There will be a “PayPal field” built into the Account area of your membership interface… but this hasn’t gone live yet.
Everyone will be given multiple notices when or if the day comes that this feature goes live.
April 8, 2010 at 2:07 PM[Reply]