Ipaya Advantages for Self Publishers, Artists

Join forces with other publishers
Asking your visitors to pay just to see your own pages is very difficult. But if you would join forces with many other self publishers and allow visitors to pay once to visit the pages of all publishers, asking your visitors to pay would become much easier. This is the basic idea behind Ipaya.

Earn a good living by publishing your works right on the Internet
You create literature. Or comics. Or music or film. And you'd like to not only publish your works on the internet, but also get paid for it. Now it's the best way to start.

Ipaya means that people can visit pay sites like yours for a flat, fix fee. At the end of each month, the money of each user is then distributed evenly to all pages he visited. Since this system is a lot more convenient than other pay-to-see systems, your consumers are much more likely to sign up, and therefore pay you money. Imagine a world where you can get paid for the works you just put on your website. This world can finally be here.

Comparison with other payment systems
There are currently to major solutions for self publishers: Donations and Pay-to-see.

Donations (Example usage)
The obvious shortcoming of donations are that they don't guarantee you that anybody pays. You could have a million visitors a day and nobody that thinks he should be the one that pays.

Pay-to-see (Example usage)
Let's find its problems and compare them with Ipaya:

Traditional Pay-to-see		Ipaya
Big programming effort needed
	Still need to construct a payment interface. People want to come back, so you've got to let them create accounts with logins and passwords. And have a password recovery function.	Programming effort is very small, because payment interface and account management is handled by Ipaya. For everything else, drop-in-place examples are already provided.
Consumers hate to think about spending money
	They might very well decide against spending. But, they like it when something is free or they have already paid for it.	The burden of thinking is taken off consumers. They have to decide once at the beginning for many sites and can then access as much things as they like.
Your consumers hate to go through a long payment interface
	They need to not only enter their credit card details, but also their name, their address and other things, which takes a lot of time.	Payment is needed once at the beginning. After that, every click instantly shows the desired page.
People hate creating logins and passwords
	It takes up even more time. And people hate to memorize passwords. They also often forget them and lose access to your site.	Instead of registering a dozen times, people register only once. Less to memorize, less to forget.
Big time overhead on the wrong party
	Your consumers are the ones with the money. Shouldn't the work actually be on your side?	Your consumers have nearly zero time overhead. Publishers need to drop some programs in place.

Alternative to ad banners
As a self publisher, it's very difficult to sell ad space because you are not well known and can't ask for high rates. And as an artist, it's also difficult to sell ad space without spoiling your integrity.

Works against the "success-tax"
You surely have heard this story before: Somebody creates a cool website and everything works fine. Then suddenly, the site becomes the latest craze, and everybody rushes to the page, creating enormous server bills - until the server provider pulls the plug and the page disappears. Instead of fame and fortune, the only thing this event brought to this someone is either limited fame or a huge server bill. With Ipaya, this doesn't have to happen anymore: As soon as traffic increases, so does your income from the traffic. You can now afford your site's popularity - and your income grows with it.

Publishing ideas
Here are a few ideas what you can offer on your site besides your main publication:

Annotations
Background information on how you created your work
Drafts and ideas during the creation of a new work
An open diary connects you better to your audience, and they visit you regularly.
Reviews and recommendations of other artists

Realize the digital publishing advantage
The internet has the power to directly connect you to your consumers, allowing the seamless exchange of information and money. Yet until now, nobody has been able to leverage this power to sell their works digitally and live "right off the net".

Think about it: By selling your works digitally, you eliminate many expenses:

books don't have to be printed, CD don't pressed anymore
there is no publisher asking for his share
physical distribution is not needed anymore
no retail store wants its stake

These expenses previously reduced the money of your consumers by a factor of 10 (books) to 20 (music) by the time it reached you. Now on the internet these expenses are gone, so you can sell your artwork...

at one tenth of the price
... while still earning the same amount or more!

The price of an Ipaya subscription is at $3 during the introductory months, which climbs up to $10 in 2004. Of these amounts, $2.30 are open for distribution during introductory months, and $9 afterwards. When thinking about the money reduction factor of 10 again, these prices correspond to a buying power in the old non-digital world of $23 to $90 dollars which every visitor has in his pockets for distribution every month. If you can catch the attention of only one visitor, and this visitor spends 35% of his monthly page views at your site now (or 10% in 2004), you have already sold him the old-world equivalent of one paperback novel.

Calculation examples
It's the mass audience that lets your site really fly. Imagine you have a daily comic site. Access requires an Ipaya subscription, and you have 20,000 regular visitors. The webserver costs you $400 to handle all the traffic. If those 20,000 visitors would pay you just 25 cents a month (which is a rate one can expect, since your visitors will visit your daily comic about 25 times a month and a typical pay-per-page amount of 1 cent can be expected), you would earn a monthly gross of $5,000. If we subtract the server costs, and project the result onto 1 year, we find out that you would earn $ 55,200 each year after expenses. Please calculate your own examples. We hope that you find out, that with Ipaya you can earn a good living by publishing your works right on the Internet.

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