Limiting Free to .edu

Free ain’t what it used to be. It costs a lot of money.

Keeping content free can be very expensive. Just look at the decision process that Hulu is going through. On one hand, the site is an unquestionable success measured in visitors. People want the content. On the other hand, it doesn’t generate a consistent, predictable revenue stream. It has all the risks associated with any advertising supported content business. To make matters far worse, their best and most popular content is the key to the largest and most consistent revenue stream that content licensees have, subscription fees from your local cable/sat/telco TV provider.

So what about this as an interim solution for Hulu and other comparable sites. Take a page from the first years of Facebook. Limit free to people with qualified .edu emails that register.

Students make up a big chunk of the population most likely to make the time to steal content . So why not just recognize it?

Sure, it may make some other people unhappy. Sure, its not foolproof. But its a starting point.

Im curious what readers think.

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About Mark Cuban 144 Articles

Mark Cuban is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, billionaire internet entrepreneur, and chairman and owner of the high definition television channel HDNet.

Mark made business history when at the age of 32 he sold his computer consulting firm MicroSolutions to corporate giant CompuServe and became fabulously wealthy overnight. Cuban later did the same with yet another enterprise, the live streaming Internet operation Broadcast.com, and sold it to Yahoo! for a record breaking price that pushed his own net worth into the billions.

He publishes his own blog at Blog Maverick where he speaks freely about basketball, technology, business, and the Internet.

Visit: Blog Maverick

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