March 16, 2001, Newsletter Issue #11: Amazon Honor System

Tip of the Week

Amazon.com`s Honor System gives you, the web site owner, a way to get paid for your content. In a sense it`s a way to beg your visitors to give up a buck or two in appreciation for all of the great content on your web site. Will it work? Time will only tell.

I took a quick look-see at about thirty participating web sites to find out if people were really willing to shell out a buck or two for web content. On the whole it appears that the normal everyday visitor to your site is a long way from being ready to "give it up" so to speak. Only one web site; Jakob Neilsen`s USEIT.com was making any serious coin. In three days (approximately, 24,000 page views) it earned $324 ($62 of this go to Amazon.com) But let`s face it, most of us aren`t generating 8000 page views a day, hence our chances at getting that kind of payoff are slim.

Most sites had earned a big, fat zero. Some had made a few dollars. When I asked some friends if they would be willing to pay their favorite web sites for content should they adopt the Honor System, most just laughed. I just think that the prevailing sentiment is that content on the web should be free.

My guess is that the few who had made an Honor System payment for content will probably never make another one. I just know that the attitude most will take is "I made one payment... let somebody else make a donation." I know that`s exactly how I would feel, too. So unless you can generate lots of new visitors to your site, I don`t think you can count on initial contributors to pony up some cash a second or third time around.

Your little honor system web page on Amazon allows you to place a suggested donation amount on it. So why not make it easy on yourself and everyone else that visits your site. Place a suggested donation of a million dollars. This way it`ll only take one person to make a donation and then you can pull the little "beggar box" off of your site and replace it with some "real" content!

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