While you were sleeping, Qidian made an announcement that they will implement advertisements and Patreon. Therefore, the raison d'etre of your poll disappeared. Maybe, that's why it's gone?
Dunno. Didn't merge it, personally. It was probably lost when it was merged into the big thread, though. Just something ya gotta accept when so many people are making threads on the same topic and many of them are being merged together.
"Lost" meaning removed. Usually when many threads are merged, polls end up removed in the end. Maybe because they no longer match the opening post of the thread, maybe because there are multiple polls and it's easier to remove them all than try and justify keeping one or another, etc, etc.
@ongoingwhy There is most likely going to be a paywall. I'm not just saying that because Ren said there would be, but also because it just makes sense for Qidian to use one. It's a business model they're familiar with and one that works. Expecting them to run off ad revenue and donations is actually pretty silly.
That said, the actual structure of said paywall and the price range is anyone's guess, though. It might be a mirror of their overseas paywall or it might be a little different. Either way, though, it'll be affordable as all hell. They won't be trying to cripple their readership - they'll be trying to have as many people reading, and paying, as possible.
If it were me ,I would ask for a cut of donations for sponsored chapters and encourage them to adjust the price per chapter as site as readers increase.
@Westeller And how exactly would they implement that when the "fanbase" is perfectly alright to resort to piracy at any given time? Like @archfear has mentioned, it's likely that a percentage of the donations would be given to Qidian.
The problem with yenpress is that it wanted to go mainstream that and the deep-rooted belief of Japanese executives regarding print distribution is the wah to go.
@ongoingwhy Someone said earlier that a fairly massive portion of Qidian's readership in china pirates. Doesn't change the fact that they make a killing from people that don't pirate, or pirate some and pay some. ... To be honest, there really haven't been many (any?) cases where piracy has actually been proven to drive down revenue. In some cases, it's been proven to have the opposite affect.
Donations are much less reliable in terms of revenue than a fixed payment required per reader. At least, I think so. I might be proven wrong by numbers, but I'd be surprised. I'd also be surprised if Qidian truly decided to just gamble on it like that when they have a business model they already know works, and works tremendously well.
I guess the thing would be like, some people pay, some people who pay would pdf it on reddit, and we would be good to go, the cheaper the paywall, the more pirates would be who just copy the novels, so be at easy, you would soon be able to choose from a myriad of nonquidian related websites to read or get your favorite novel in diferent formats
@ongoingwhy For piracy, I was actually referring to studies on our side of the world. I have no idea about any studies on piracy conducted in china. It doesn't harm business HERE.
At least, not for the large scale companies, of which Qidian is one. For them, piracy can actually be beneficial. I wouldn't go so far as to say piracy wouldn't hurt an independant fan translator trying to live off donations. A single aggregator could totally cripple them.
To be honest it is less a question if a paywall is a good business model and more about if the western/international webnovel community is ready for it.
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