I think Rails was one of the first technologies that demonstrated how screencasts can radically speed up your learning. Do you remember all that buzz after famous Creating a blog in 15 minutes video ? For me and many other people that was exactly that "wow!" moment. I was sold. That is a power to see how things work vs. reading about something. Another proof is TV vs newspapers power.

So people love watching things. Lets just all agree on that.

Here is one site that publish amazing content. I enjoy watching Ryan Bates RailsCasts and I actually learned a lot about Rails thanks to it.
Here is how site looks right now:

As you can see it has lots of great screencasts and donate button is somewhere in the corner.

This might be ok for Ryan and his highly-popular, sponsored website, but might not work for Joe-the-hacker who occasionally publish some great screencasts on his blog. Visitors might super appreciate his video, that just saved them tons of time and nervers.

But lets face it - they will most likely forget/or didnt want to spend time to leave some tips/donations for that! That is one of ideas behind startups like Flattr.

Now what if Joe-the-hacker has $200/hour job in bank and knows how to code in some "SUPERPJAWA" system? Why on earth will he ever spend few hours to make some high quality screencasts or tutorial? Remember, this is not blog post that you can quickly write in 15 mins. That might take few hours and special preparation to produce high a quality video tutorial.

Ads?  Hardly his small blog has enough traction.
Self-PR, to get dream google job? Not sustainable and not effective.

Now imagine Joe can produce great content and make small amount of money on that. Imagine people will easily donate him or buy his courses. Maybe $10/month (that is just two $5 donations from random visitors). If he makes 5-10 such videos over month that is $100/month of passive income.

Now lets think for a second - how cool is that? He can spend more or less time, make great content or just short junk, experiment will all possible pricing models from donations to very strict one hour access for $1000? What kind of content can be created in such eco-system?

Today Videolla rolled donations as one of supported business models. You can suggest your users to pay/donate whatever for your video right within the player.

Can we make video education sustainable with such system? You tell us!

Example:

 

About Videolla.com:

Videolla.com is the most complete no-ads monetization platform for your video content. Its great all-in-one tool tool for encoding, hosting, publishing, streaming, renting, selling, tracking your premium video content. We do it all for you. Enjoy!
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