[Suggestion] Novel Pricing
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Are there any legal manga reading sites that have ads? I can’t think of any. Yes, people selling something they don’t have the rights to can make money that way but I don’t think it’s worth it if you’re not stealing what you’re selling.
Also comparing the price of Harry Potter to Light Novels is crazy. Harry Potter sells millions and millions of copies and keeps selling many years later. They can charge less because they’ve made their costs back many times over. Your comparison of value to value comes with little economic understanding. Compare the prices of LNs and mid to low tier teen novels/ you go adult novels with similar page counts and you’ll see that barring a few exceptions even without licensing fees, the prices are similar.
In fact many things are far more expensive of a cost per time of enjoyment. Heck look at Western Comics, they’re 4-5 dollars American a pop and take 5-10 minutes to read. If you’re willing to look at the value of illegal items such as scanlation sites, then you’ll also notice the price proportionate for cocaine use to the time of pleasure it allots is much higher than Light Novels also. Plus you run the risk of it being laced with something harmful, something you don’t ave to worry about with JNC novels. So you could just as easily argue Light Novels are on the cheaper end of the spectrum with both other legal and illegal goods.
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@the-green-death What i'm suggesting is not stealing but merely a redistribution of profit. Say you turn a profit by running ads, you can then use that profit to make up loses were you to lower price. Not all ads are harmful, FB do ads all the time. Ads are not meant to be harmful really, if not why do they even bother advertising
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@mianli Facebook has many millions of users (probably more users than the number of people left who read for pleasure), it’s not a like for like situation. I can think of many situations where ads would be profitable, I just don’t imagine that it would be for a company like JNC.
Reading books for pleasure in the modern era is a niche practice. Light Novels are a niche of a niche. For ads to become profitable you need to get a lot of passive views to turn into engagement and a lot of engagement before a sale is made. Ads work due to huge bulk of people who interact with them, I just don’t see Light Novels being able to draw that number of ad views, thus the money isn’t made.
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@the-green-death So you are saying this site is so insignificant that they won't turn a profit running ads? Any site can run ads really
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As a rule of thumb, if a business provides you a service for free, then you are most likely their product. If you as a site enable ads you enable tracking by ad services, meaning you get paid for allowing gathering information on your customers as well as showing them targeted ads.
You also need to remember it is not site costs they have to cover, but licensing fees and localization costs. To turn a profit from ads you need a lot more hits compared to selling their products, so it is not a viable business strategy for this.
And anyway, what is the issue if it's profitable enough like this? If you don't like the subscription service you can just buy the ebooks when they come out. It was quite clear what being a member gives you. -
Like
In another world with my smartphone is around $8.74 on Japanese Bookwalker
Grimgar is around $5& I feel like you, guys, are forgetting some costs too.
Difference ain't that high, especially when there are many things to be done before it becomes a proper release like translation, cover designs, book layout designs, etc.
Like take a look at another example like Schoolgirl by Dazai
It's published in English by One Peace Books and it's one of most famous Dazai's novellas.
& it's by $9, even though it's shorter than LNs and have no illustrations either.Also, product price should be set with expenses like the site domain's coverage, any money paid for advertisement, etc. being in mind as well.
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@name I'm not suggesting their service be free because of ads, but the cost of Ebooks on Amazon can be reduced or they can give more discount by obtaining profit elsewhere, and what is with this tracking theory, ads are not human, they only give you information and collect information anonymously to give you better ads, one you would more likely buy. What is wrong with that? an algorithm which evolve to serve you? whether or not you choose to buy said product is entirely up to you.
Any website can turn a profit with ads, no matter how small really, Ads do not require you to click on them to generate profit for the one who runs the ads, all they need is exposure to the ads. Merely by being having it on is enough to turn profit
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@mianli I don’t think anyone is arguing that ads can’t make a little money, what we are saying is they can’t make enough money to significantly change the price like you want them to. You seem to doggedly ignore this argument.
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@the-green-death ? what do you mean? say mangafox used to run entirely on ads. Ofcourse I don't have the exact number to say how much profit it would gather nor can I say for sure if it makes a different but really now, does it hurt to try? Or would you rather just you and a couple of people can afford to read LN because all of it is licensed?
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@the-green-death With how much a volume costs right now I can say for certain that most people can't afford it but think about it if each of them donate just $1 to the author, that makes a different. They are not stealing, they want to donate and enjoy the content but are unable to. Is it fair to generalize and limit a form of entertainment to only a certain number of people?
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@mianli Pretty much the only costs they have are for the servers.
J-Novel are a professional company and as such actually pay their translators and pay licencing fees to the copyright owners instead of stealing the work done by fan translators.
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@mianli said in [Suggestion] Novel Pricing:
Any website can turn a profit with ads, no matter how small really,
Merely by being having it on is enough to turn profit
[citation needed]
You're probably stretching the definition of profit really far.does it hurt to try?
If by "try" you mean make everything free then it's a very risky business decision that may or may not require approval from Japanese partners and it's not like you can easily "untry" it if it doesn't work well.
If you mean doing some kind of limited run to see how well it works (and estimate whether or not you will get 2x free users at expense of having paying users and end up loosing money) it's already done with Rokujouma and Isekai Mahou. -
@mianli Mangafox is a pirate site, the same metrics don’t apply. They are stealing their content.
I can sell TVs far cheaper if I steal them, that doesn’t mean Amazon should match my prices.
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@mianli Umm, I do not even know what you are trying to say here. are you saying ppl should "donate" 1 dollar and just so happen to get a free LN (where the aftermath is Companies lose tons of money and we lose tons of LN due to it)? Also, what do you even mean by "Is it fair to generalize and limit a form of entertainment to only a certain number of people?" How is it limiting in the first place? creators make money off their pieces of art and entertainment and because of that they can make even more art and entertainment. This make more art and entertainment while giving it all out for free or heavily underprice will not.
Some questions for you:
Is it fair that Authors and Publishers want to make money so they can survive and can provide even more entertainment? Is it fair that there are countless pirate sites that run Virus-filled ads and make money off of stealing from the creators? Is it fair that you need a computer to read JNC series and that computers cost quite a bit of money, something you would probably not get if you are in great need of money. -
@mianli What you are arguing for is the abolishment of copyright and the return of the patronage system that existed during the renaissance.
Practically, even at its most extreme, if say for example I ran an unskippable 60 second video commercial prior to reading each part, and that commercial was a high value ad like ~$7 CPM, and let's assume that 100% of our monthly active users (~30,000) read 50% of the parts we upload... Every month we upload ~70 new parts, so that's 35 * 30,000 ~=1 million impressions. Therefore $7,000 in revenue per month from advertisement. Wow!
Except wait a minute. 70 new parts a month is ~ 9 volumes per month. Each volume costs about $4,000 to fully localize. That's $36,000 in expenses just from localization. Doh!
Also wait a second... that $7 CPM only applies to users who live in the US and Canada and other 1st world countries... which only make up ~50% of those 30,000 unique users.
So really revenue from that add would only be $3,500 a month.But wait! Who actually reads 50% of our content? Even if it was free most people only read 4-5 series max. That's 20 parts a month, not 35. So really it's only $2,000 in ad revenue.
Okay okay... But that $2,000 is still something, right? We currently sell about 30,000 ebooks every month. If we take that $2,000, we could discount the price of each of our ebooks by............
$0.07!
All for the cost of 1 unskippable video add before being able to read parts!
(Oh, but I didn't account for the loss of the $20,000 or so a month of subscription revenue we would lose from making reading free... Guess I have to actually RAISE ebook prices by $0.63 instead!)
Now I know what you want to say: But if the subscription is free you'll get a TON more readers! Yes, but not nearly enough. It would have to be a 250 times increase to come close to breaking even.
tldr; I have done the math. The math doesn't work for ad-supported.
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@the-green-death My point from that was that MagaFox was able to pay for its massive server and employees while also able to develop and sell merchandise through the use of ads. That is money. I want to say again that I am not suggesting this site be free and do all kind of illegal translating.
My point is that the costs of their product could be lower if they agree to run ads to make some money
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@sam-pinansky First of all calm down, you can remove me if you like. The reason why I have been writing all this comment is because the price of a light novel volume is simply a lot. No matter how much making it costs if you can not reach an equilibrium price that is not my fault. What I suggested is a suggestion to maybe reduce cost per volume and help both this site and potential readers to enjoy a light novel.
If this somehow came up as offensive then I am sorry but the truth of the matter is. The cost that this website proposes per volume is simply too much for most reader and licensing and stopping a form of entertainment to trade readers of different places to my mind is simply not right. -
Saying cost is to high is based on ones perspective, that should be the end of this conversation.
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@mianli I'm not angry, just providing some facts that counter your suggestion.
Running ads would provide only a very small amount of additional income, not enough to offset the ebook or subscription cost. It would barely cover the cost of production for half a volume a month, and the negative effect of ads on subscriber numbers would surely cause a lot of people to quit.
It would be a terrible business decision. Internet advertising just isn't efficient enough at these scales. If you have any other suggestion for lowering the price, go ahead. -
@mianli said in [Suggestion] Novel Pricing:
The cost that this website proposes per volume is simply too much for most reader and licensing and stopping a form of entertainment to trade readers of different places to my mind is simply not right.
I am just wondering where you got that from? that the cost is higher than most readers.
