PPV Strategies: Content Windows
Most content ages better than butter but worse than wine. It’s most valuable when new but still retains some economic value for a long period of time.
Content owners like movie studios would love it if everybody was still paying $15 a ticket to see Barbie, but the best they can get is a few dollars of pay per view sales on Amazon at the moment.
When they run out of customers willing to pay that much to see it on Amazon, they’ll put it on a streaming site where they average out at tens of cents per view. After that, they’ll squeeze what they can get out of advert television.
It’s striking that this pattern hasn’t changed much in the past 20 years.
But don’t pity Hollywood just yet—many films, surprisingly, rake in a significant portion of profits during later monetization phases. Take, for instance, ‘Titanic,’ which grossed substantially from DVD sales and TV rights.
Mass market audiences may not directly pay as much per view as the early adopters, but they can create significant secondary revenue through merchandise & events.
The strategy of lowering prices with age isn’t exclusive to movies. In the analogue world expensive hardback books would be released before cheaper paperback books. This approximated a high price content window before a lower price content window.
Some people genuinely preferred hardback books, but I guarantee you most of the people queuing for the midnight release of Harry Potter in 2005 would’ve paid the full price regardless whether the story was written on anything from a scroll to a leatherback,
I used an AI impression of such a queue because I couldn’t find a free stock image of one
A modern example of content windowing is the pricing of video games. This is a cleaner example than movies or books in some ways, because customers purchase exactly the same digital file at different points in time so there’s no cinema screen experience or paper quality to muddy the water. See the below figure showing the gradual reduction in price of games from Amazon price tracker data.
At Papervue we believe that many content creators in social media could use content windows to improve the monetisation of their content.
Imagine a YouTube documentary channel premiering videos on pay-per-view (PPV) platforms two weeks before releasing them on YouTube. If these videos typically garnered 200k views, translating to $1000 in ad revenue, the $10 PPV sales might attract 500 purchases, amounting to $5000 in revenue.
While the figures are hypothetical, they illustrate how a small fraction of viewers embracing PPV content can exceed revenue earned solely from YouTube ads. Implementing content windows presents a viable opportunity for content creators to enhance monetization strategies.