The Jones Deception

[Ohnoes]

I don't bring anything new to these forums as far as degrees go but I do have a background in advertising. I just happened to see a link a few days ago to a post at ATS that was a little old but is something that I still see floating around and is just something I wanted to comment on.

Many of Jones fans claim that he isn't in it for the money, and to back that claim they also pull the "If he was in it for the money then why would he tell people to make copies of his dvds?"

Well the answer is very simple...Advertising = Money!

Now I'm just going to really take on the DVD subject because while he has advertising on his webpages they seem to be more purchase based than the typical google ads click based system. Meaning he gets a percentage of what the advertisers sell. Not to mention we know he isn't going to throw google ads on his site!

OK...Lets say you and your buddy are thirsty and he/she goes into the house and gets you a soda. Now this is a soda you have never heard of but try it and it turns out you love it! Well you aren't going to continue returning to your friends house everytime you want that soda...So you go out and buy your own. Now you can enjoy that soda anytime you want and because you enjoyed that soda you may enjoy some of the other sodas this company makes so you try some of them to...Soda companies factor this into their advertising schemes and sales figures. The same thing can be said for free samples of products in the mail or in the store..Once you try you may possibly buy. It's a classic advertising scheme and is still the model for most companies campaigns.

Now the same can be said with these DVDs...Let's say you make copies and put them on 10 cars, now of course you run the risk of everybody just tossing these DVDs, but I don't believe everyone will(mind you this is a personal theory). Curiosity will take over and people will watch and most will probably toss the DVD after 10 minutes, but lets just say you do run across 1 or 2 people who find the subject matter so intriguing that they decide to learn more. This leads them to one of Jones sites where they find more information that they can purchase and they do, thus Jones makes money by someone buying another DVD or buying a subscription while not having to spend any extra money on the writable DVDs used to copy the movie or the time used to advertise it.

The internet is different because you could probably find all his movies for free, but he takes that risk assuming that a percentage of those people will still find their way to his site and buy a product or a subscription for that "rare" content. Think about the free radiohead album that came out about a year ago. Your first thought goes to "wow these guys are cool because they did this for free!" So later if you enjoyed that album you will not have a problem paying for their newest album because they are such "cool guys".

Now most of his target audience are people with social disorders IMO and in this day and age there is no shortage of these people. So in the end his "free dvd" is really just a ploy to use these people to do his advertising for him while he makes a quick buck. Keep in mind also that DVDs are cheap to make and since all his production seems to be done in house he really doesn't spend that much in that area either.

Now of course this is just my thoughts on this, and I could rant on this all day with other smaller points, but I just wanted to throw this out there. I apologize if it seems more like ramblings but I rarely make big serious posts.

 

[Foolmewunz]

Is web advertising any different from print or broadcast advertising. No one in those media gets a piece of the sales pie from their advertisers - that I know of.

I don't disagree on the DVD giveaways, though.

 

[Horatius]

The internet is different because you could probably find all his movies for free, but he takes that risk assuming that a percentage of those people will still find their way to his site and buy a product or a subscription for that "rare" content. Think about the free radiohead album that came out about a year ago. Your first thought goes to "wow these guys are cool because they did this for free!" So later if you enjoyed that album you will not have a problem paying for their newest album because they are such "cool guys".

Here's a good essay to point people to, when they claim that AJ "giving stuff away for free" proves he's not in it for the money. This essay examines how, when Baen Books started a program of allowing people to read some of their books for free, as e-books, they actually ended up increasing their sales of regular books.

This program has been so successful, Baen Books now regularly includes CDs with copies of new hardcover books, that include dozens of other titles, just so people can be exposed to them.

Some key quotes:

As a practical proposition, the theory behind the Free Library is that, certainly in the long run, it benefits an author to have a certain number of free or cheap titles of theirs readily available to the public. By far the main enemy any author faces, except a handful of ones who are famous to the public at large, is simply obscurity. Even well-known SF authors are only read by a small percentage of the potential SF audience. Most readers, even ones who have heard of the author, simply pass them up.

Here are a number of facts which you should consider:

1) The first title to go up into the Library was my own novel, Mother of Demons. That was my first published novel, which came out in print in September of 1997. At the time it went into the Free Library, in the fall of 2000, that novel had sold 9,694 copies, with a sell-through of 54%.

As of today, according to Baen Books-a year and a half after being available for free online to anyone who wants it, no restrictions and no questions asked-Mother of Demons has sold about 18,500 copies and now has a sell-through of 65%.

(An aside on publishing terminology. "Sell-through" refers to that percentage of books shipped which are actually sold. Many books are never sold at all, but are returned to the publisher. Sell-through is therefore always expressed as a percentage. "Net sales" essentially refers to the same thing, in absolute numbers.)

I would like someone to explain to me how almost doubling the sales and improving the sell-through by 11% has caused me, as an author, any harm? The opposite is in fact the case. Mother of Demons began its life as a typical first novel, with very modest sales and sell-through. Today, it has better than average sales and much better than average sell-through-a change that took place simultaneously with the book being available for free online.