Licencing authoring software by course views count
Jul 31, 2011
Hello everyone!
I need your help brainstorming a few ideas, if you don't mind.
As you well know, Articulate Presenter costs exactly the same amount of money whether you develop courses that are used for many years by thousands of people or if you develop courses that are used only a few times by a few hundred people in a small enterprise. This pricing model is used for all desktop authoring tools.
Now imagine that you paid for the tool depending on how many times the course is launched. Say, $0.01 for each launch. This way smaller and less popular courses would cost less, larger and more popular courses would cost more. Large corporations would pay more to use the tool (as they should), while amateur freelance developers would pay very affordable prices.
I imagine technical problems with this model. However, technicalities aside, what do you think of this? Are there any software companies that do this? I appreciate any feedback and ideas.
Thank you!
Brian
1 Reply
Interesting. On the plus side, software companies probably wouldn't charge for upgrades, but the incentive for releasing a big upgrade probably wouldn't be there either.
Remember, that when you charge for something you are essentially discouraging that activity. So by making the software free and only charging for privilege to view the courses two things will happen. One, the number of people that download and install the software will skyrocket. Two, the number of people actually taking courses will plummet.
It also eats into the one of the big values of eLearning (over classroom). This being that all of the costs are (more or less) up-front. Once it is out there it doesn't cost a company anymore if 2 people take the training or 20,000. And the people in charge of budges have one less thing to worry about at night.
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