GenderLife Forum: The Information Exchange

Big news, girls! We've decided to test-drive a new business model with our instructional videos and selectively offer them for free viewing online, by serving ads alongside them to make up for profits lost from hard-copy sales.

We're starting with the first video in the "Coming Out" series, and I'm letting forum members know first, before we go completely public with it. Feel free to view these videos as many times as you like, and share the links widely around the internet.

For those who wish to have a large, full-screen DVD to watch at their leisure, we will still offer the DVD version for sale. But this new business model, if successful, will allow the widest range of people to view the resources while still generating some revenue via ad views on the pages.

Let us know if there are any probelms viewing the video during this Beta test, and happy viewing!

http://www.genderlife.com/video

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Oops, didn't realize people couldn't leave comments. Now you can! =)

Cool. This is really neat. I hope it succeeds as a model. For one thing that will validate a larger interested population in Ts happenings than some "experts" have identified.

I happen to think the format, for instance generating a fresh page view every 20/25 seconds and having to click 4 to 6 times for every minute of video will turn people off and reduce revenue cos you have to be seriously dedicated to get through a whole video without going insane.

In this day and age of 5 second attention spans, large format quickly loadable you tube style video and user friendly interfaces it fails miserably.

For generating new page views it isn't bad, but I doubt many people will get to the end of a single video without getting bored or send the link to friends due to the clumsy unfriendly format.

Just my 2 cents of uncalled for free opinion.

The page should not be refreshing every 20/25 seconds. Is it doing that by itself somehow when you watch? And you're having to click something every 20 seconds? I don't understand how either of those things can be happening, as I hand coded the pages, but if so let me know and I'll fix them.

The way I look at it is this: yesterday, the only way a person could access this resource was by purchasing a DVD. Today, anyone with a computer can watch it for free. If they don't like looking at the ads on the page (which take the place of them having to pay for it), or their attention span won't let them finish watching it, it's not hurting me any, it's their loss of the resource.

I think there are a lot of girls who would be very thankful for the information that they, possibly, could not otherwise afford. I think that the idea of offering these educational videos for free is a good balance between providing as much education as possible and making a profit. It cost money to host webservers, buy (or rent) video equipment, produce videos, and set aside large amounts of time to plan and produce content. I hope that Callie and Andrea make a lot of money giving away content to a community they care about. I think's it's a wonderful gesture.

-Madi

This is great news for new girls — thanks Calpernia!

The videos, especially the "Coming Out" series, really did take an incredible amount of work to plan, produce, distribute and maintain. I'm not even sure that this method of serving for free with ads alongside will work... It's a big risk, because the sales of the videos are a huge contribution to helping Deep Stealth do almost all the work we do: websites, media activism, etc. But we are going to try it with select videos first, and then possibly with all. =)

By the way, I didn't ban "Kymeera" for (rudely) calling our free video offering a "miserable failure". Their comment prompted me to look more closely and discover that they had been banned under other names, and more recently in other threads had been incredibly rude to Kara Thrace and others.

I don't want anyone to fear offering constructive criticisms, but this person ticked me off with their small but acrid body of work here.

Kymeera a troll? Nah, as TS goes, she's the real thing..I should know, I've spent 4-5 months in her company. Just a French person with strong opinions is all.

If she has ticked you off, then it's your shout and fair is fair.