How to sell video just for download on Website?

Yes, but Jon, if Van Gough had given his paintings away for free, would they be worth $80,000,000 each today? Of course, he didn't sell a single one in his lifetime, so there's that to consider. LOL

But seriously, even if we give our DVDs for free, we still need to run a TV commercial like the Video Professor, and that's a few thousand dollars investment right there. And then there is the cost of making 1000 DVDs at $1 each.

Maybe a training video of some kind ...

What do you think? How would you make it work?
 
Careful of modeling after the Video Professor. He might break even with the $7 in shipping to cover phone orders but where he is making his money is in the high price of the courses at $190 or the monthly online membership for $30. In this case FREE is not necessarily free. An interesting company story over the past few years.

Sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Professor
http://www.videoprofessor.com
http://www.infomercialscams.com/scams/video_professor
http://denver.bbb.org/WWWRoot/Report.aspx?site=33&bbb=0885&firm=15503

I am sure the Professor spends an enormous weekly amount on tv marketing. The method of "free video and just pay for shipping" may work if you can get an affordable marketing plan.
 
aha! that's the glitch in the ointment - forgive the mixing of metaphors :-) Somehow one must get the traffic to the website or put the ad on TV or in the papers. But some aspect of the plan could still be applied to selling DVDs.
 
You can also get sponsors for your short, convince them that because you are giving away your product for free, the potential exposure is limitless for them. Get multiple companies to sign on, and the $$$ start to add up quickly. This could be more effective on downloads, because you can get a "site hit" count or download count, that you can use to solicit companies for add space on your video or website.

My questions about this though, is if you can manage to pull this off, how do you collect the money for shipping costs? Also, what companies are best for getting DVD's reproduced in bulk? i am trying to weigh the costs of getting my own equipment to re-produce DVD's (some form of Lightscribe) I would prefer to pay a little more and have a better quality product.
 
I like the sponsors idea too. Modified this formula could make it work better. Once there are sponsors, some of the money can be used to make $1000 DVDs for $1000. Placing Google Ads is the next step.
 
Netflix has proved one thing to us -- there is a market for people who want to watch movies streamed to their PCs.

What would be great is if someone could setup something similar that exclusively handled indie movies and short. A small monthly fee, or a pay-per-view setup. No doubt it would be very expensive to startup, but what a boon it would be for us!
 
tunejunkE said:
You can also get sponsors for your short, convince them that because you are giving away your product for free, the potential exposure is limitless for them. Get multiple companies to sign on, and the $$$ start to add up quickly. This could be more effective on downloads, because you can get a "site hit" count or download count, that you can use to solicit companies for add space on your video or website.

My questions about this though, is if you can manage to pull this off, how do you collect the money for shipping costs? Also, what companies are best for getting DVD's reproduced in bulk? i am trying to weigh the costs of getting my own equipment to re-produce DVD's (some form of Lightscribe) I would prefer to pay a little more and have a better quality product.
Click to expand...

I haven't been overly impressed with the quality of the LightScribe labels. Wonder what the cost would be to get some kind of quality silk-screened labels done on the DVDs?
 
I would be interested in finding that out. I am interested in reducing overhead as much as possible. No point in paying someone else to do something you could do yourself, right? Unless of course, they can do a way better job than you? I would pay $1 per DVD if it was a good product, that's a great price! Even if i had to make my own packaging.....

Still wondering how to actually charge for shipping and collect payment online?
 
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