Friendly and constructive criticism; I cannot bear to watch these because of the horrendously bad audio. Get someone who knows how to do proper audio recording to advise you guys!
The pricing feels really high. $9 per 60 minutes of content is a similar price as watching to a $200 million dollar hollywood production, I know you can't compare the two but it gives some perspective.
I mean if you pay $100 an hour to two people to code for 2h, with the basic editing and setup these videos cost maybe $750. That means you can break even (read: get paid $100 per hour per person to have fun coding) after 40 people watch a particular video, and that just seems like such a small number. Realistically you'd probably get a few thousand sales per video.
So in terms of costs, it seems quite overpriced. And in terms of value? Well comparing it to university it's sort of cheap, but not by much. A typical resident tuition fee is about $10k per year, that's 24 semester credit hours at $420, which is typically about 15 hours of tuition which is a rate of $27 or so per hour, while here it's $9, about a third. But college tuition involves a lot of other extras outside of those contact hours, tends to be subsidized, has the added value of awarding the status of a degree beyond its educational value, and is generally regarded as really expensive to the extent that we can't speak of universal access to higher education.
Anyway all of these are just for apples/oranges comparisons for some perspective. The better comparison would be say Team Treehouse which has 2 weeks free, then $25 monthly for access to over 1.000 videos, a development environment, support etc... it just seems ridiculous to charge $18 PER video. It'd be cheap as hell if it was a masterclass by experts for PhDs doing niche Machine Learning. But I'm seeing basic projects like 'parse a calculator' or 'rank a poker hand'.
I'm sure there's a market for it. Plenty of not-so-poor people around looking to learn how to code. But the pricing at least to me feels really high. Undoubtedly Growing up in a free youtube / streaming / torrenting culture definitely has shaped this perception. But more realistically, alternative tech educational services like Treehouse that offer 100x more similarly professional content for the same price make this seem like a poor purchase.
In terms of competition, I showed some numbers for an extremely similar service, Team Treehouse. They both operate in largely the same niche, and Team Treehouse is definitely the better product (better edited, well-thought out videos, review, examinations and a development environment, all for $25 monthly for 1.000+ videos, while this offers just a single video that's less thought-out, not edited as well and has no examination for $18).
The other numbers I posted were mostly regarding cost. And cost has no niche. Whether you produce for a broad audience, or a niche audience, if you're in a small conference room with an iphone-quality camera recording two dudes working through relatively elementary programming challenges, it doesn't matter whether that's a niche, or whether that's something extremely mainstream to watch. The cost is going to be low. i.e. you can pay a programmer $100 an hour, two of them, for a two-hour video ($400) plus very simple editing, for $750, hell make it $1k if you want.
Then compare that to their pricing, and you get to something like 50 people watching a video to break even.
In a world of online, digital education, with tons of great coding sessions on youtube for free, I just don't think pricing an elementary coding challenge like 'rank a poker hand' at $18 makes a lot of sense. Seems to me you're much better off charging a few bucks and trying to get thousands of people to watch the video instead, or price it at $18 for access to multiple videos for a month, much like their competition which operate in a similar niche with much, much cheaper prices for more professional content, imo. (I'm talking about an order of magnitude more content per dollar easily, even two orders of magnitude.)
The problem I have with this type of lesson, and similarly kata, is that they are always implementing some rather trivial toy example so they they can fit the whole process into some digestible time span. This is useful, but I think there would be a lot of value in watching a seasoned engineer at work in an established code base rather than full end-to-end toy examples.
I personally love these style of videos, I can see myself being a regular consumer of them. I'd pony up for a subscription...
but at an 18$ price tag for each video, I feel like that any video I get from you would be only one video. I mean, how good of a programmer are you, really? Eaking out some of the best of youtube? Are you sure? If your value isn't there, where is it? Video quality? definitely not in audio... It doesn't feel more comprehensive then anything else out there.
which is 32 bucks US, it's a pretty steep price, but there are a few things that help justify the price, huge numbers of art assets, obvious talent, innovative techniques on display, guides on setup, official support from blender, and part of that money goes to blender and its development, and blender deserves that money.
You see the contrast.
I'd be interested in a subscription if the plan is to keep making these, I'd be interested in buying the lot if it's not, but the lot costs 72$
Interesting however from the tasters seems to be quite bland and non-worthwhile material especially for that price.
I do wonder if this will catch up and we might see the birth of "lets code" videos with developers streaming their work on twitch.
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[ 1.9 ms ] story [ 30.4 ms ] thread:-)
Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5crTdwaje4c and many others...
I mean if you pay $100 an hour to two people to code for 2h, with the basic editing and setup these videos cost maybe $750. That means you can break even (read: get paid $100 per hour per person to have fun coding) after 40 people watch a particular video, and that just seems like such a small number. Realistically you'd probably get a few thousand sales per video.
So in terms of costs, it seems quite overpriced. And in terms of value? Well comparing it to university it's sort of cheap, but not by much. A typical resident tuition fee is about $10k per year, that's 24 semester credit hours at $420, which is typically about 15 hours of tuition which is a rate of $27 or so per hour, while here it's $9, about a third. But college tuition involves a lot of other extras outside of those contact hours, tends to be subsidized, has the added value of awarding the status of a degree beyond its educational value, and is generally regarded as really expensive to the extent that we can't speak of universal access to higher education.
Anyway all of these are just for apples/oranges comparisons for some perspective. The better comparison would be say Team Treehouse which has 2 weeks free, then $25 monthly for access to over 1.000 videos, a development environment, support etc... it just seems ridiculous to charge $18 PER video. It'd be cheap as hell if it was a masterclass by experts for PhDs doing niche Machine Learning. But I'm seeing basic projects like 'parse a calculator' or 'rank a poker hand'.
I'm sure there's a market for it. Plenty of not-so-poor people around looking to learn how to code. But the pricing at least to me feels really high. Undoubtedly Growing up in a free youtube / streaming / torrenting culture definitely has shaped this perception. But more realistically, alternative tech educational services like Treehouse that offer 100x more similarly professional content for the same price make this seem like a poor purchase.
Beyond the pricing, love the idea.
In terms of competition, I showed some numbers for an extremely similar service, Team Treehouse. They both operate in largely the same niche, and Team Treehouse is definitely the better product (better edited, well-thought out videos, review, examinations and a development environment, all for $25 monthly for 1.000+ videos, while this offers just a single video that's less thought-out, not edited as well and has no examination for $18).
The other numbers I posted were mostly regarding cost. And cost has no niche. Whether you produce for a broad audience, or a niche audience, if you're in a small conference room with an iphone-quality camera recording two dudes working through relatively elementary programming challenges, it doesn't matter whether that's a niche, or whether that's something extremely mainstream to watch. The cost is going to be low. i.e. you can pay a programmer $100 an hour, two of them, for a two-hour video ($400) plus very simple editing, for $750, hell make it $1k if you want.
Then compare that to their pricing, and you get to something like 50 people watching a video to break even.
In a world of online, digital education, with tons of great coding sessions on youtube for free, I just don't think pricing an elementary coding challenge like 'rank a poker hand' at $18 makes a lot of sense. Seems to me you're much better off charging a few bucks and trying to get thousands of people to watch the video instead, or price it at $18 for access to multiple videos for a month, much like their competition which operate in a similar niche with much, much cheaper prices for more professional content, imo. (I'm talking about an order of magnitude more content per dollar easily, even two orders of magnitude.)
but at an 18$ price tag for each video, I feel like that any video I get from you would be only one video. I mean, how good of a programmer are you, really? Eaking out some of the best of youtube? Are you sure? If your value isn't there, where is it? Video quality? definitely not in audio... It doesn't feel more comprehensive then anything else out there.
It reminds me VERY much of the blender series. http://www.blender3d.org/e-shop/product_info_n.php?products_...
which is 32 bucks US, it's a pretty steep price, but there are a few things that help justify the price, huge numbers of art assets, obvious talent, innovative techniques on display, guides on setup, official support from blender, and part of that money goes to blender and its development, and blender deserves that money.
You see the contrast.
I'd be interested in a subscription if the plan is to keep making these, I'd be interested in buying the lot if it's not, but the lot costs 72$
yikes.
I would consider actually buying these videos as the concept looks interesting but honestly, not for near price of 20. But fiver would certainly do.