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A couple months ago, I wrote about Yaga, a P2P startup that allowed you to share files with others -- not just music, like Napster, but all kinds of files. (see www.samizdat.com/yaga.html) At that time, they had just bought a micropayments company, MagnaCash, and were considering how they could create a "digital marketplace" where content providers could get paid for their text, music, video, and software files; and where users could readily find such files and get them for a reasonable price.
Now they have relaunched their fledgling company, based on new and intriguing business models that open new revenue opportunities for content-rich Web sites, which over the last year or two have been hard-hit by the demise of banner advertising.
It isn't often that a new company completely redesigns and redefines itself, just half a year after it started. And this one looks like a winner.
As Arnaud Fischer explained in a recent chat session (see www.samizdat.com/chat210.html for the transcript), "Yaga has experimented for many months, not only on the technology front, including Search and P2P file sharing, but also trying to understand where we could really contribute to content delivery, and provide a great experience for users."
They started with a form of peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, trying to understand how to increase efficiency of delivering content across a network. At the same time, they learned about what people want to download, and how they behave in such an environment. Now instead of that Napster-style file sharing, they ask content providers to upload files to the Yaga server. Members pay a $9.95/month subscription fee for the right to download as many files as they like, whenever they like. And content providers share a 30% royalty pool from the net subscription revenue, distributed based on the popularity of their respective files, less applicable bandwidth costs.
Many of these content providers are into music and video. But some, like me, have articles and books and would like to build an audience for these works and, at the same time, get paid for them. If you have an ebook, you might be much better off making it available this way through Yaga, than going to an ebook publisher, where you may well be asked to pay a fee to post you book on their site, and where you are likely to get nowhere near the number of readers that you will at Yaga.
With the recent demise of iSyndicate, the mammoth Web-based content syndication company, and also the flea-market-style content sharing for pennies at themestream.com and thevines.com, I'm very interested in testing out alternative ways of getting paid for my content. At this point, it's hard to tell what the Yaga pay out will amount to for files like mine. That will depend on the number of subscribers and the number of content providers and how often users come to my files -- and I have no idea at all yet what any of those numbers will be. But Yaga does have a special introductory offer, "guaranteeing a minimum $100,000 payout each month, for October to December 2001."
Soon they plan to once again add P2P sharing to their model. Many, but not all, files should be available on the systems of the content providers and also on systems of members/users. End users will be able to earn credits for sharing with other users content that they have downloaded, thus decreasing bandwidth costs and improving download speed for everyone. This approach will take advantage of technological advances that Yaga introduced in its first P2P manifestation. If your connection is faster than the PCs that are serving up the files you want, Yaga will connect you to several at the same time, taking different pieces of identical files from different sources and automatically patching them all together.
The MagnaCash technology helps economically keep track of all the credits for users who make their systems available for P2P sharing and also for the content providers who own the files.
They recently licensed AltaVista's search technology to make it easy to find files across the Yaga network. And they use in-house technology for security such as file fingerprinting to make sure that content is legal.
As a next stage of development, Arnaud says that Yaga is considering pay-per-download models, which might be more attractive for some content providers. He compares this business model to that of cable companies, which have a basic service (in this case, many files available on an unmetered, unlimited basis for a monthly subscription fee) and also "premium channels" (in this case, perhaps special content collections, accessible for an additional fee) and also pay-per-view (in this case, special, current, high quality content, for sale on a pay-per-download basis.)
Yaga is also now launching a "bulk publishing" model known as Yaga Access. Content providers with many files or frequently make changes to their files and add new files need not upload each of these by hand to the Yaga server, and need not keep coming back to upload new versions. Instead, joining a special program, they can keep the files on their own server, but in a password-protected area set aside for Yaga members -- behind a "subscription wall". Yaga members can download these files, just as they can the files stored on Yaga's server. And the content provider gets paid a portion of the subscription revenue, just like those who upload their files to Yaga.
This model seems like a natural for newspapers. They could make their current articles available for free and put their complete archives in a Yaga area. Then, without having to pay to develop and maintain their own content payment/subscription system, they can piggy-back on Yaga's system. Their revenue isn't likely to be great, at least at first, but their costs are likely to be far lower.
In cases like that and also for ebook publishers, Yaga could and should take advantage of the AltaVista search technology that they have licensed. For now, they only use that search engine to check through the info in their directory -- with the few sentences that content providers enter with each of their uploads. But the raw power of AltaVista can index the full text of documents, not just descriptions or summaries or key words. In that case users would be able to search by phrases and by entering numerous search terms and could get very precise results. Also, Version 3.0 of the AltaVista search product can handle over 200 file types, including .pdf files -- far more than the public AltaVista site. That capability could make it far easier for Yaga users/members to find the text files and books that they want to download. And with multiple crawls through the network each day, the content of the Yaga index could be much more current that what you get at public search engines, which typically take 4-8 weeks to update their indexes.
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