For a while now, I’ve been part of an educational photography site called DSLRU (DSLR University). It was essentially like the iTunes store for photographic learning material, having a mix of video, text, and downloadable content (like Photoshop actions). The main idea was that you’d own any content you purchased, unlike other subscription sites, and that the content would be available in low-cost chunks so that you could buy just what you wanted.

Unfortunately, we recently decided to shut the site down because we weren’t breaking even from it and didn’t see a viable way to increase our business. I wanted to share my experience in case anyone else finds it helpful.

First, let me say that I’m really proud of the site. I think our look and user experience were top-notch. Everything worked as you would expect, from how the content was organized to how you’d purchase courses to how you’d post in the forum. We also launched with some great content, from beginner to higher-end, thanks to a few professors who believed in us. We also had some good momentum initially, by running a contest with Nik Software that entered you in a raffle when you posted in the forums or bought a course.

Our main problem was really a chicken and egg type situation. We needed more content to get more users, but since we couldn’t pay an advance on content and only had about 1,000 users signed up, we couldn’t get content since we couldn’t guarantee users. If I had to do this again, I would definitely figure out how to allocate money to pay people some small amount up front, like a traditional publishing model, and then switch to profit splitting once we hit a payback point.

A PR campaign would have helped, but honestly, effective advertising is expensive. We bootstrapped the site ourselves, putting in our own money and time, and we just didn’t have the cash to invest to advertise. I’ve also done some advertising before with FlipBook, experimenting with some different models, and what I found there is that while it increases brand awareness, it often doesn’t payback the cost in sales. I definitely would do any PR campaign with a PR group who knows how to get you the most bang for your buck.

Another problem we encountered was that everyone was starting to get into the educational pool, and often sites provide content for free in order to promote something else they do or sell, even if it’s just banner ads. DPReview, for example, is expanding to offer training material for free, and they make money from other parts of the site. We don’t like ads and wanted a clean experience, but well, we failed. We also did have free content, but our hope was to monetize it through conversions and not ads. Turns out we weren’t getting conversions.

We also set out to solve the fragmentation problem, where you can find lots of info by searching, but you never know how accurate it is or how well formatted it is. Plus each author has to setup payment processing, self-publishing, etc.. Lastly, if we have one good repository of learning material, hopefully people would come back again and again to learn something new.

If you ask someone, they’ll say they’re OK spending a dollar or two to have guaranteed-good content, and authors seem to like the idea of having someone else handle the publishing/payment aspect. And in practice, it doesn’t pan out that way. People are fine getting the info for free from any random Joe Photographer, and PayPal and such have made it easy enough to setup payment processing that Joe Photographer prefers to do it himself and keep 100% of the profit. I do think if we’d reached a critical mass of content, this wouldn’t have been an issue, and our original idea would’ve proven correct.

I guess the moral of this story is that it takes money to make money, and even though we had a well-executed idea, to really build it up to reach critical mass, we would’ve needed to risk more on the site.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 6th, 2011 at 1:04pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.