Let's talk about piracy and free information.

I think that in itself the concept of free information is the best thing that happened to our civilization after the invention of the thermos. Yes, and, perhaps, too. Is that dairy farming can argue.

Open Source is a phenomenon that became possible just a few years ago. Now you can see how open source software effectively crowds out some proprietarism from the market, and people around do not consider this to be something special. Both on that and in the other market there are companies that earn money from their “offspring”. In the proprietary segment - because they wrote and sell, and in the open source segment - because they wrote and support.
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And it seems that pretty soon it will affect in general all industries where intellectual property is possible. Why do I think so? I'll explain now. Perhaps, of course, I am not right, but my feelings suggest that the familiar models will soon move off, as many physical information carriers drove off at one time.

Films and cartoons. This topic is very close to me, because the secondary licensing market is familiar in details. The development team, roughly speaking, makes a modern cartoon more often than not in order for a TV channel to pay for content. And even the opposite, cunning TV channels can request from the authors for showing in primetime.

The task is to get licenses for toys based on the cartoon, sell the rights to any notebooks with heroes and other merchandise. The money collected on this space, often one or two orders of magnitude greater than the budget of the cartoon. With films, the situation is similar, but there is still a large organic source of income - box office cinema. Outside of these fees, too, is a hell of a lot of merchandise - starting from the Star Wars toy swords and ending with the terrible board game 50 shades of gray. The other day I saw a child riding in a cart of “Auchan” and smearing snot in the face: “Yaaaa I want auto-auto!”.

In electronic games, too, there are a lot of merchandising. The same "Angry Birds" at the peak were sold even in the form of school backpacks and soda.

But still the main story with the games is not in it, but in the fact that they are really bought. The first bell for me was the "Wangers", who liked it so much that I began to look for a large licensed box of them. Found 7 years after the game, when I could afford it - yet in 1998 I did not have the financial opportunity to do it. I gladly bought it, now the box is gathering dust on the cupboard and makes me very happy. Although it did not have the coveted rug with Lipuringa. Rational reasons for doing so I definitely did not have.

The second bell was Dima’s purchase of the Counter-Strike for Mosigru back in 2011. More precisely, the server service, you connect, enter a password, play along with all yours. Buying a service turned out to be the most convenient way to solve this important corporate task. Actually, this is probably the first of the social package that we had :). An acquaintance told about the policy of WoW - they say, how much the pirate will fit, but anyway, then the curve of the game will bother you, go to the official servers. He did not play, but it seems to be true.

Business software? The best model for Rapid Miner is sophisticated professional software, and one that almost always if you need it, you have money (you are a business!). The penultimate version is in the open source, the last is 30 days of trial and some time in work until the task is downloaded that consumes more gig of RAM for grinding the base. It vividly reminds Photoshop - if it were not for the disks from the 90s, then I would hardly have spent hundreds of hours learning how to use them. And now I have a skill fixed at the level of motility patterns, and of all the brands in this market I have only one left to choose.

Books?

Here is more fun. Here I stuck my head in the market when I wrote my book. I can say that before that I had been in contact with authors who complained inhumanly about pirates and low circulation due to them. You had to feel it yourself to draw conclusions. The conclusions are sad for these authors.

Let me explain why. The book has two simple metrics: coverage and sales. Books are written for three main reasons: for coverage, for sales and for public relations. If you make a recipe book in Central Asia, these are straightforward sales. If you are writing about how you have fun gashled your business and want to share useful stories - this is coverage. If you work as a scriptwriter, copywriter or you know a lot about MS products, you write a book (two, three) and become a recognized expert. By the way, that's why copywriting, advertising and other media industries have so much selective dead-end sludge.

You can't earn money by selling books. Humble, that's a fact. The average print runs of publishers barely cover printing and marketing costs. Publishers earn that “shot”, and continue to sell bestsellers, not spending money on the development of the project, but simply sending copies to the prepress.

The average book coverage is 5,000 people. Bestseller (less than 1% of the market) - 20 thousand per year. Coverage of the same post on Habr - from 10 to 40 thousand on average (there used to be from 20 to 100 thousand approximately). The coverage of the post in LJ - 5 thousand people in the light for 25 bucks. Writing a book in the era of the Internet is simply not rational if you work on coverage using the standard model.

If you are writing for self-promotion, then neither coverage nor sales do not bother you - it is important for you to only put the project in the portfolio. In principle, there are comrades who pay for the circulation of their book themselves, just to have a reputation as an author and, for example, sell trainings. At the heart of this scheme is a bubble, which seems somewhat, let's say, unnatural.

But this whole scheme easily breaks free access to the text of the book. And no, I’m not talking about Flibust even (although about it too), but about any service that makes it possible to read free and easy.

Want an example of a successful project? The guys from our Ridero told - please, the book market in Poland, the model “liked - pay”. At the end of the reading at one of the popular services, you are asked how the book is, they ask for an assessment - and they immediately offer to pay the author (the service takes a commission). Now is a surprise. The average payment for a free e-book was higher than for a paper copy. This is in a world where the author rarely receives more than 5% of the price on a shelf from paper, more likely - 2-3%. At the same time, of course, they pay in principle for only 20% of the books, and the border is very sharp: either all or nothing. If you do not fall into the “audience sympathy,” you will receive a few units of transfers.

The same kickstarter with books and other things is a second example of luck: do you want to continue? Buy up the circulation, and the author will write it with pleasure.

In my case, the story is this: only 50 pre-orders, mad sales of the first days (the first edition left), then the second peak at the time of the electronic version (it had to be on paper, because many wrote reviews and reviews - half of the second circulation went), then smooth Recession and exit to stable sales. The classic product curve, the familiar sales of new phones from the curves (only we are much, much more modest). At the moment when the book became a bestseller on Ozone, we had a short surge in sales. At the moment when the cunning pirate scanned and laid out the book on Flibusta, we did not see anything on the graph (approximately 536 downloads and readings in the first three days on Flibuste). All my acquaintances, as one, the authors assured that the appearance on Flibust is at once a sharp decline in both electronic and paper versions. True, during my experience the library was already blocked (when they saw their recessions, there was no block), so the experiment is not clean.

But often there are such posts Vkontakte. Pay attention to the very bottom of the screenshot, this is completely normal, I would even say, the natural behavior of the user:



Or here's a great review: “Hi! You have a great book, I bought three, presented it to two friends, then I got tired of going to the store and sent ten more letters with the file, sorry . ” From the point of view of the publisher, 10 sales of the electronic version are clearly missed. From my point of view, in a good win - so the buyer would not have reached the store at all, and nothing would have changed. And here he sent a file to 10 friends (and they can send it further, since he found it and selected it in the letter). I think at least 3-4 people in the chain will like the book, and they will buy a paper one, at least as a souvenir. And, again, do not forget that our interest is in coverage, unlike the publishing house, whose interest is in sales. But all parties still win.

So piracy works, and works awesome. The main point is to understand that if a book is bought easier than it downloads from a tracker, Flibusta or Kontakt, it will be bought by those who can afford it. The usual "Starbucks" differentiation by price.

And yes. For the book they gave the award "Business Book of the Year in Russia" at the international economic forum the other day (this is a real holiday). So, taking this opportunity, I want to thank the mail.ru company - guys, you made the coolest, largest and most working exchanger of "Vkontakte" in the country, and thanks to him the book became really popular.

So what's left?

In the new environment in the first place goes skill. Skill is more important than information. Previously, it was difficult to learn, because the main problem was the dissemination of information. Now the main problem is your own desire to highlight something in the information flow, raise your ass and learn. Acquire specialization, transforming someone else's experience into your own, and then getting practice.

So welcome to a world where you can always start from scratch.