Not exactly, he's charging for the location where the ideas can be exchanged and stored and referenced (the forum). He's charging for access to translated material of his own works (the website). He's charging for access to discussion recordings referenced with a table of contents and possible script.

The only thing he's removing is comments on the blog posts, which even the members won't have directly. They just can comment on the forums.

As for charging for things that used to be given away for free, yep, that happens when the economics of a situation change. I personally think it'll hurt the amount of members you can get (removing the blog comments for example), but unless you're the one footing the bill for what was given away it's a bit arrogant to say what should or should not stay free.

Not saying you shouldn't complain about it, but don't be upset when someone says you're being arrogant about it either.

[ファブリス]

BlueFinger Wrote:It's like you just deciding we should pay to use this forum the exact way we use it today.

This is not comparable at all.

This forum (as an example) was always freely accessible both reading and posting. So that is the expectation that people have for the future as well. People would understandably be pissed off if all of a sudden you were required to pay to browse it.

Some places you can browse but you have to pay to participate.

And then some places the author may ask to pay up front to participate in a new forum that is put together with specific purposes (the thing that you are paying for eventually).

Didnt' Khatz just add the forum? He's not "stealing" anybody's content. he's building a new community service as a paying service.

It seems the confusion here (or rather the ignorance), is that you expect that ANY FORUM, regardless whether it was paying up front or later, should be freely accessible to all.

Why should it be? A forum is a service.

I think the confusion is because of user generated content on one part, and because the internet has become a sort of beacon for "freedom". So people have this expectation that today everything should be free.

There are gazillions of communities out there, anything for learning kanji, to how to date women, to satanic cults, to old men talking about little boys, to charities, and so on. Some have a great value others not.

Some of these communities are very technical oriented and work like a place for exchange of knowledge or just contacts. In the old days you'd organize conferences, or drinks , you'd have to pay for the rooms, food drinks, advertising. If no one comes there is no value at all, so in the same way the value is "user generated", yet it is a service. Someone puts in place the means by which you can comfortably and easily go and get your information, ask questions and so on. This service costs money, even on the web.

EDIT: And I should have added, that nearly every valuable community forum out there doesn't happen by mistake. It flowers slowly and with guidance. You don't get a good community forum without any direction at all. And that too is part of the "service" that one forum manager may ask people to pay up front.

Then of course you can say "what's the value of it if I can get it somewhere else?". Well GOOD FOR YOU man!! Go and get it for free and stop complaining.

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BlueFinger Wrote:he's charging for old features he has just cut from the now called free members.

Did he remove the comments and turn them into forum posts? If a blog author chooses to remove the comments that's their choice. I understand it can piss off users, but that's been done before. In doing so he is not stealing your work at all. You chose to go and paint something there on the wall that others can see. Now you're attached to it and you're pissed off because you had the expectation that your marvellous posts were going to be visible till the end of times, or 2012.

Well though luck. The house owner decided he wanted to paint over the wall and doesn't allow people to write on it anymore. That's all. He's never taken the intellectual property of your work in that process.

The biggest problem that I see with it is that there is no content. He is asking users to sign up for an empty forum with no users with the promise that there will be content (if the eventual users make it) and an eventual community (if he ever gets enough paying customers).

His excuse is that the only way to have a well behaved forum is to have it behind a pay-wall. That is complete nonsense since revtk's forum is generally very well behaved, while some other pay forums (/w free browsing) I've seen had lots of flaming and trolling. Is khatz going to be willing to ban a troll if it means he's making $10 less per month because of it?

It would have been far smarter to make the forum free and then bring in some way to monetize it (perhaps in a way like somethingawful). There should also be some sort of profit sharing (or service discounting) arrangement for contributing users if his entire service is just made of user contributed content.

ファブリス Wrote:

BlueFinger Wrote:he's charging for old features he has just cut from the now called free members.

Lots of text.

What I was trying to say, and am not really sure why you became a little aggressive about it, is that the only thing that still had value for me on AJATT was the community, in other words, the people that used to comment, post their opinions, methods, links etc.
What he did was commercialize that, commercialize what his readers were producing.

You can say it's no problem to do so, since he is the owner of the site, and he can do whatever as long as it's not outside the law, since he is a free man and what not, but between participating on a community for free, and participating on the same community for a monthly fee... I choose the former one, and since AJATT didn't/don't have a community big enough or at least worthy enough to do such a move, I guess I rather just rethink my main sources of language learning.

My comparison about the hypothetical situation of you just deciding to sell memberships to this forum is by no means absurd, it's exactly what is happening there, the difference is that this forum is much better and I would rather pay to use it than to use the AJATT newborn project (not trying to give you any ideas).

I guess he was doing pretty well on donations and sponsors already, he could even go for something bigger inside this area, signing up with heavy sponsors, like international-shipping bookstores and DVD/CD stores.

People agreeing with me or not, that's my opinion. Others can't label me as ignorant just because my opinion don't fit with theirs, unless they prove they are illuminated by the gods or something, and that their opinion has more value than mine or a beggar's.

Hm, I might be the only one here who signed up for Khatz's new service. I did get a discounted price from him for the first year ($65). I don't necessarily know that I will keep it beyond that time. I'm having trouble right now seeing where it will be particularly vibrant, as I don't have the feeling that many people have signed up for it so far. Although it is a very young forum indeed. The content to date has mainly been the audio diaries that he mentions in the promotional blog entries for AJATT-plus.

I think my main motivation for signing up was to support Khatz. I have read his blog for the last year or so and have found things there that were helpful to me. I tend to be the silent reader and selfish user (hence my low number of posts on this forum as well), but like Khatz's style of writing and many of the tactics he has used to approach language learning have helped me to greatly improve.

Fabrice's posts here and Khatz's start of the pay service, serve to remind me that I am not very good at all about financially supporting sites that are useful to me. I very much tend to take them for granted, and don't think about how much I would miss them if they were to go away. I know that endeavors like RTK and AJATT are costly both in terms of time and money, to maintain. Labor of love doesn't pay the bills at the end of the month.

So to that end, I have joined Khatz's forum and have started a monthly contribution to RTK.

rochel Wrote:I think my main motivation for signing up was to support Khatz. I have read his blog for the last year[...]

This year I made my first contribution to public radio, and I ordered kanjiposter which is semi-supporting. I think. So I certainly know how this feels. Oh, and insert argument about downloading music yet I also still buy albums.

Could we cut a deal where, like, I donate $10 now and percentage off the learning materials in the future? Because again, I only disagree with the amount, not the practice.

I have also supported Khatz for some time, though not through any of his "products".
I guess I just prefer showing my gratitude if the content really affects me, rather than buying something to get it.

Is it too old school to suggest a prominent display of server costs and how donation levels contribute to it? Although what I don't like about the former bit is similar to what Fabrice suggested, I don't think there should be an obsession with only 'breaking even' with server costs when donating.

Online Advertising only pays if your site is big - really big. We're talking huge traffic..100,000 users is nothing in the general scheme of things.

Also AJATT and RTK are both quite niche sites; no idea of the traffic, but it won't be massive. With googleadsense, it's unlikely they'd even break even on server costs.

[ファブリス]

IceCream Wrote:surely the only difference between these and sites that make money is that those other sites have more advertising?

I think you're missing one major component: traffic. Income from advertising is directly proportional to the traffic since the typical rate estimation is based on dollars per thousand views (Cost Per Mile).

IceCream Wrote:There seem to be tons of successful companies that just make money from ads

Their pageviews are probably in the MILLIONS per month.

BlueFinger Wrote:

ファブリス Wrote:

BlueFinger Wrote:he's charging for old features he has just cut from the now called free members.

Lots of text.

What I was trying to say, and am not really sure why you became a little aggressive about it, is that the only thing that still had value for me on AJATT was the community, in other words, the people that used to comment, post their opinions, methods, links etc.
What he did was commercialize that, commercialize what his readers were producing.

You can say it's no problem to do so, since he is the owner of the site, and he can do whatever as long as it's not outside the law, since he is a free man and what not, but between participating on a community for free, and participating on the same community for a monthly fee... I choose the former one, and since AJATT didn't/don't have a community big enough or at least worthy enough to do such a move, I guess I rather just rethink my main sources of language learning.

My comparison about the hypothetical situation of you just deciding to sell memberships to this forum is by no means absurd, it's exactly what is happening there, the difference is that this forum is much better and I would rather pay to use it than to use the AJATT newborn project (not trying to give you any ideas).

I would say "no it's not the same thing." Because that wasn't a community to start out with. It was a blog. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a blog just a diary or journal type of thing that's accessible to the public (aka millions of people on the internet)? Wouldn't that be like writing in a paper diary and passing it around school and work to have everyone read it and then write comments about your entry in it? That doesn't sound like "community" to me. I've never thought of it the way I just stated it, but after just writing that, that sounds more like a "look at me and pat me on the back" type of thing. (Not that all blogs are like that, but some are.) I think of community as going to your friends and saying "hey I thought of this what do you think?" And having an actual conversation. Which is what a forum is. imho
So really what Khatz is doing is not allowing people to write in his "journal" and opening up a community via forum. Albeit, paid, but that's his prerogative. And he has readily admitted to being egotistical (which automatically makes a person prideful) so maybe he's on some trip thinking he deserves to be paid. (Which maybe he does I don't know.) I too thought it "sucked" that he closed the comments (which he hasn't done yet btw) but then it was just him deciding not to let anyone write in his journal. Which as someone else has already stated, plenty of other bloggers have done the same.

I agree with what others have said about getting great ideas over here. AJATT isn't necessary for that. I kind of just view AJATT as a book not a community per se...

That's just my 2円.

IceCream Wrote:i dunno. i don't know the traffic, or really how it works at all. but, it seems that income is variable depending on how much advertisers are willing to pay for the space, so it isn't as simple as just the number of people that visit.

By giving up a piece of your sanity and/or soul.

Quote:i also don't know how often something counts as a new click. 100,000 users might seem like nothing, but if they all sign in at least once a day, that's a lot of traffic in a month...

we could all have like, 1 hour caches & keep logging in...

No! Do not do this! If an advertiser catches your site doing this you're *#&@ed... you could possibly end up loosing money.

IceCream Wrote:i dunno. i don't know the traffic, or really how it works at all. but, it seems that income is variable depending on how much advertisers are willing to pay for the space, so it isn't as simple as just the number of people that visit.

Yes it is. The amount advertisers bid for you to show their ads in googleadsense is directly related to how popular your website is, i.e. how much traffic you get. All internet advertising services are based around this model.

You could of course contact sponsors directly, and host their ad's directly without the middleman. But then AJATT has already don't that (all those adverts for kanjiposter.com) and so has RtK (white rabbit press) and it's obviously not paying enough.

IceCream Wrote:here's another site: http://www.entrepreneurs-journey.com/105...vertising/

That article is from 2005 - the web has moved on alot since then.

On another note, did anyone see that Khatz replaced his AJATT plus post with a much more heartfelt one about...AJATT's commercialization? Since the response to his first post was mostly positive, I assume he might be reading forum threads (like this one?)/blog posts about the subject.

...How can a blog post about something I have no plans to buy make me feel warm and fuzzy inside?

Also, if AJATT + has launched, how come I still see the comments and comment form?

EDIT: Looks like he wrote another AJATT + feature post afterwards...

From what I hear, comments are mostly positive because he deletes anything negative.

Jarvik7 Wrote:From what I hear, comments are mostly positive because he deletes anything negative.

Not to handwave, but the entire point of the site is motivation, so that's understandable.

Tumblr Is Turning a Billion Page Views Into Cash, but Not Through Ads

"So how does Tumblr plan to generate cash from this massive amount of Web traffic? By shunning the traditional embedded advertising model, it seems. They also won't be going down the "pro analytics" path, which was once an option. Instead they'll be rolling out a plethora of very small-scale cash-raising efforts, each of which is an adornment to a user's Tumblog in some way--like paid, artist-created blog themes, or "stickers" that you can buy for your Tumblr friends at a low cost per item, very much like the way such companies as Zynga are monetizing their Facebook apps."

Reminds me a bit of what Fabrice was talking about implementing (?), billion page views aside.

Yonosa Wrote:

kendo99 Wrote:As much time as he's put into that blog, and as much encouragement as he's given to so many language learners, I hope he makes a ton of money.

It's a nice way to think kendo, but it comes down to falsely representing himself. AJATT used to represent a free place for motivation and tips of following a study method. Not only has AJATT been usurped by RevTK, even before this latest commercial move. But now that AJATT is changing its entire image I believe RevTK has definitely become by far the best place for advice on the method that Khatz may have popularized but was never even his own method to begin with. The fact is, the majority of the people who frequent that AJATT were attracted by the free abundant information available there and the seemingly nonthreatening noncommercial environment of it all. But now I think AJATT's creator Khatz is hoping that his ability to persuade enough people that his blog deserves some of their money to show their appreciation is running short. I mean how much stuff does one really have to buy in order to show their appreciation, his previous products have all imo not been that great and not really provided anything or any information that we can not get for free here or elsewhere on the internet.

But now we must show our appreciation monthly to join a forum, and at a steep price especially considering the fanbase is likely young and not necessarily able to afford it at the moment. I think what Khatzumoto is trying to do is good for himself but I would have much rather have seen him start a new venture rather than commercialize and change the personality of AJATT. Bad move hands down and imo we here at Revtk are a vibrant and overall intelligent and we donate to keep out community going, and not to fatten someone's bank account so that later he may be ready for other business ventures as is probably Khatz idea. So therefore hes asking us to contribute more to him than to our own studies, and our own interests, imo 100 people sign up for one year lets say, and that's like almost 10k, is that really about providing a service? I think it's far more unbalanced and one sided than providing an honest service, worship the idol and give him your gold and he shall let you post comments on his blessed blog. haha, Anyways just my op. AJATT has been removed from bookmarks, and likely will never see a return.

totally agreed. i wont pay for it. too expensive. this site is way yyyyy better

I also signed up for AJATT+

To me, it was an easy way to support someone who has given me a lot of motivation over the last couple of years. Not all of his posts are great, but some of them are, and I've turned to them in times when I felt like I'd never be able to learn Japanese and a lot of times they helped. I spent $10 for that- not so much for the forums, etc (though I did want the mp3s from AJATT.talk*). It's up to 140 members, which is probably more cash than Khatz has seen from his site up until AJATT+ started. I'd probably do the same thing he's done if I were him- he's created something people want and are willing to pay for- good for him.

That said... I don't find it to be an improvement on what we have here. It might in the future, I don't know, but I like it here better. I don't plan on paying for more than a month of AJATT+ at this point in time- I haven't seen anything that makes it worth the money yet. If Khatz actually released some of his original material in Japanese, I might have a different opinion, but he hasn't done that yet.

*The .talk mp3s aren't all that impressive- you can find way better content on YouTube.

I see AJATT talks about dual timeboxing now--you are very welcome -- $90 please. Just kidding, you can come here for whatever ideas you want, for free, I won't make you pay, especially since I'm into this notion.

Actually, shortly thereafter, I went from the nested descending intervals/(10+2)*5 with 'null media' microsegments using dual timers as mentioned above to triple timeboxing, where Tea Timer: http://sourceforge.net/projects/tea-timer/ takes care of the largest block, Anki the middle boxes, and for the 'null media'/microsegments I use Firefox's tea timer when not relying on song length. However, you can do it all with the non-Firefox tea timer program as well, re: setting multiple timers, I just had started using the Firefox addon first so I never got around to changing the habit this year and solely using system tray Tea Timer.

I've also found nesting's not really necessary if each of the main middle timeboxes are different tasks rather than Japanese/mono-thematic, i.e. not aiming for a block of portable temporal immersion, thus no need for null media microintervals to maintain the immersive binding between intervals or 'refresh', as the task-switching alone does the trick.

So, just got an email saying that AJATTPlus is free for me this week. I just have to sign up, and then remember to cancel my free subscription in 7 days time.

Browsing it now. This forum is very good reading, but not massively active - mandarin form for example, only has 8 threads. The most popular forum after "general language learning" is (unsurprisingly) "Ask Khatzumoto", with 4 pages, but he doesn't respond to every topic (usually some other forum member tries to answer the OP's question).

As for other content, havn't really dived in properly yet, but seems to be alot of focus on a new type of card Khatz is using (MCD - massive closed delete). Lots of blog posts and forum topics etc.

Anyway interesting site, but no way worth $16per month for me at least - i really feel that there is more useful content and a more active helpful community on this forum than there. Will have a proper read then un-subscribe methinks.

What's wrong with making money? If somebody wants to pay...
JapanesePod101 was completely free at the beginning, too.

I've always admired people like the Admin here, who invest their time and money to create something useful for others. I wouldn't have the patience.

I would gladly pay for audiobooks with parallel e-novels. If/when Khatz decides to sell them, let me know at once.

Absolutely nothing wrong with him trying to make money. I totally understand he doesn't want to give up his time for free, and having a community who are all paying to participate creates a seriously creative environment.

Thing is though, for me $16 doesn't represent good value for me. To compare, smart.fm's monthly price is going to be $8, and skitter is $10, and those are both pretty fully featured web-apps. $16 per month for a forum and a few blog posts is alot, especially as Khatzumoto doesn't actually active on the messageboards or comments sections.

There may be audio books and other content in there btw, I'm mainly going through the forum.

Nothing wrong with him making his money. He provides a service and if customers value it that's their business...It's not like he's selling crack to babies. Personally, I don't see what you would gain from hanging out on a forum where presumedly everyone is just in agreement with each other though. There are plenty of people offering just as good or much better advice for free. Why pay more to get a narrower range of opinion...?