tapir wrote:The question of monetizing was raised earlier in this thread and while it is encouraging to hear there are plans I am not particularly convinced they will work, especially as playing itself will be free. (And there are ample opportunities to play online free of cost, so you won't convince people to join if you start a server with a fee to play.)
If the whole traffic is on a website advertisements may work, but I am not sure how much money this is supposed to earn. You may imagine "plus-accounts" (or another way to monetize possibly unique bonus features) as is practice elsewhere, but again they are not creating a particular impressive revenue stream judging from KGS. You may try to monetize on side bets on ongoing games, but you are heading for trouble as betting business is highly regulated / taxed etc. You may want to take a fee on all those teachers utilising the superior teaching facilities offered there. You may want to sell rank certificates when you finally settled for the best rating system in town - but I doubt online players are eager to pay for a paper (however nicely it looks). You can sell the player data to the highest bidder (no don't do that.) And here I am out of "monetizing" ideas, to me it looks the main idea is make Koreans, Chinese, Japanese play on the server in high numbers, then it may work out.
However, making presentations in Korea isn't enough - even if you find some people who like the idea and like to support you, even if you have a unique product. I am told e.g. that when the Western community had study software w/ game databases to offer sth. at that time not available in CJK (I don't know about now) there was about zero enthusiasm for the whole thing and no market in CJK and evidently the study cum database software had a no sizeable return on investment. Surely not MasterGo, surely not GoGoD (just imagine the time TMark spent in going over all those games again), maybe SmartGo is earning a little now with iPhone apps but it is like a big software package w/ reasonably strong computer opponent, study opportunities, database all incl., maybe MoyoGo did earn a little when new on the market, but surely they didn't earn much. Surely not GoBase or BiGo either.
Well this is a reason why we dont go out in public with the business model. We have plans, but they can change.
The presentation in korea is to set a milestone to future users, and to talk to pros to gather information. What all western ventures probably didn't do was talk to the asians and find out what they want. Thats what my prolonged stay in korea is about: what do pros want on a server.
That said i do not fancy a business model discussion like this, less in a forum. I could present you with the business/finantial model of twitter, facebook, wikipedia, kickstarter, groupon and many other's more and they probably wouldnt survive scrutiny neither here nor there. And we have a definite successful business with a name we are modeling ourselves after to.
Giving anyone satisfaction and confidence about whatever we model we pick is too high a standard, and it requires personal meetings , hours of talk and demonstrations to do so. That amount of energy and effort is obviously reserved for investors.
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