Monetizing Catalog Numbers

So how can Amos (Scott) et al go about monetizing their catalog numbers?

One way is to demand licensing/royalty agreements with people who use their numbers. But I see a fatal cost-price death spiral: the royalties have to be high enough to make them worth collecting, and that might be too high to make them useful to use.

Perhaps the way forward is to separate hard-copy & electronic applications. I don't know what to do about the cost-price problem with the former, but conjuring-up options for the latter is easy.

It comes from the fact that code can be embedded in a web page.

One option is micro-payments. If your website uses someone's catalog numbers, you add code so that, every time a page with catalog numbers is viewed, a micro-payment is made to the owner of the catalog numbers.

It is easy enough for a webcrawler to find pages where the catalog numbers are in use - one need not search at random - and verify that the billing code is inserted & active on that page, or issue take-down letters when it is not.

Q/ Any other configurations that y'all can think of?

Cheers,

Why give them ideas?

This sort of thing belongs in a catalog publishers blog, not in a collectors forum!

Peter

Is "monetizing" really a word?

You obviously don't mix with economists!

Hahahaha! My favorite economics prof wasn't a prof at all; he was a graduate assistant who was a socialist. My International Economics prof was an Israeli who had complete certainty in mathematical models explaining economic behavior (as if humans weren't involved at all.)

Micro payments beats being shut down and not able to use Scott numbers at all. It could work from a technical and usability standpoint, but there might be legal issues us non-attorneys haven't thought of. Plus, if I were a website owner, I'd rather pay a flat fee so I know what my costs will be every month. If I suddenly get bombarded with traffic, I wouldn't want to end up with a huge bill from Scott Publishing. There would have to be a cap of some kind on it as you just never know when some other site will link to you and your traffic spikes by 10x for a time.

I honestly don't know what their licensing programs and fees are like now. I assume they differentiate between someone who is using Scott#s to make money and those who might be using them for educational purposes or something else, but I really don't know. I've seen posts on this board from people who said Scott wasn't that hard to work with and the fees weren't exorbitant, so this might be a solution in search of a problem.

The best way for them to fully monetize their numbers is to make more and better products using those numbers. I can think of a couple things right off the bat. One would be printable album pages featuring Scott numbers and/or illustrations. Bill Steiner has had to have eaten into Scott's sales, and that would be a way for them to recover some of that. If Scott made such printable pages available, I know I'd be willing to pay more for them than I would for Steiner's pages. Another way would be to make the catalog available in a database format, fully searchable, with the ability to make inventories, want lists, etc. This could be a subscription based service. Heck, I'd pay money to Scott just to download individual countries in Excel format with no pictures. I've spent hours inputting catalog data into a spreadsheet before and I'd gladly pay Scott for a simple data download. There are plenty of things they can do to make more money off Scott#s, even without getting into the licensing end of things.

Not to be a snob, ikey, but I use the OED. (Wink.)

Whether or not folks like it, but dealers, publishers, and collectors make a trinity where each are interconnected. If one group suffers, then all get hit. If one group succeeds, then others benefit as well.

If Scott (or Michel, or SG, or Yvert) were wise, they'd provide an open API (application programming interface) where absolutely anybody could buy/license a certain number of inquiries to catalog data for a fixed fee. Say something like 1,000 lookups for $10. This is a working business model that a lot of business utilize successfully. Sadly stamp catalog publishers are simply stubborn (and maybe a bit stupid) by trying just about everything else.

-k-

To expand on Artful's post…
Micropayments have fallen a bit out of favor. Early on competitors, malcontents, and bored 14 year old kids slammed micropayments sites to run up the bill on the duped owners. The current obstacles with micropayment site are as follows;

As mentioned, security. Implementing a secure, robust system is not a trivial task or cost. Another concern is scalability; a system that can instantly adapt to fluctuating traffic and conditions is also a daunting challenge. And of course reliability is a major concern. A micropayment system must perform 24/7/365, no exceptions. And note that due to existing banking and payment infrastructure, microtransactions are usually aggregated and processed once a week or month. And lastly, there is the social obstacle of the feeling of being 'nickled and dimed'. There is a fair amount of user resistance to this method of payment.

Micropayments are currently being used in some notable sites such as Spotify. But there are also some very visible failures of this technology, perhaps more than successful ones. So in my opinion this is not a technology for any company which does not have either deep pockets or the in-house expertise needed to pull it off. Micropayment systems are technically feasible, but only for those companies which can make a very substantial commitment. This does not sound like a good fit for a company like Amos to me.

What is a better fit is to offer the basic catalog info for free. This might include the catalog number, image, short description, and catalog price for mint and used. This would also include simple search feature and a basic stamp identifier. Then offer a paid subscription which would add the following:
- Additional info for each stamp such as quantity printed, engraver, and other details such as errors.
- Additional pricing based upon grading
- Enhanced search capabilities
- Links to supported dealers offering the stamp for sale
- Ability to save and print the catalog info
- Ability for each user to save their own collection data. This would include a 'wants' checklist
- Ability to generate album pages based upon the online catalog
- Removal of any ads

The above would be less daunting to develop then a robust micropayment system. Plus it would support the overwhelming need to offer free, real-time info. Beginning collectors, those which have inherited a collection, and the casual hobbyist who is not as immersed as many of us would find great value in a web site like this. Supplement the increased traffic with some ad revenue and I think this is a winner for Amos.
Don

Perhaps 'micropayments' is the wrong term; if so, I apologize.

Google AdWords generates billions of dollars, one tiny click payment at a time.

The affiliate programs of ebay & Amazon et al are the sole source of income for many blogs.

If these are not 'micropayments', by what name are they correctly called?




When my Google AdWords campaign suffered an explosion of clicks from a single IP address, I complained & got a cheerful & immediate audit & refund. The second time, I was assured that there could not be a problem, as The Algorithm would have caught it. I never checked to see what they did that time, but the malicious clicking problem is easily spotted & credited.




There is nobody out there licensing such a system? You sure?




The folks at Amos should live to see the day ...




Dramatic! But all that happens is that you notice that there has been no revenue for the past few hours, and you investigate. We're not talking about the VISA credit card payment processing system, with thousands of travelers stranded in Third World airports after earthquakes; we're talking about monetizing the Scott catalog numbers.




Amos can arrange a line-of-credit with a commercial bank to navigate the week-to-week bumps in its cash flow.




Under the scheme in the OP, it is the web site owner would be paying for the Scott catalog numbers, just has s/he would be paying for hosting services, DNS registration, feedback form processing, credit card processing, etc. Perhaps you are confusing that with a non-existent proposal to have the consumer-visitor pay a fee?




Okay, clearly you are thinking of a non-existent proposal to have the consumer-visitor pay a fee. Why?

Cheers,

So the 'plan' is that each time a visitor hits a page with a Scott number, the web site owner incurs a charge from Amos? If so, then the Amos transaction server would be expected to be up 24/7/365 to handle this. It is not acceptable to miss "a few hours". Penalties are built into transaction server contacts, roll-over and fallback servers are used to ensure this is not an issue.

And is the expectation is that the smaller web site owners will just absorb the cost for the right to use the numbering system? I am not sure that this would happen.

And from the development standpoint, the idea is that these owners will be able to insert code into each page without support? Who incurs these support cost? And ultimately would not these costs be passed on to the end users?

As I said, it is certainly technically possible. Is it currently feasible that Amos could pull this off? I stand by my opinion; no. The kind of commitment just for the NRE costs would easily be in the six figures if they tried it in-house. And while they certainly could contract it out as an service, this would greatly impact the cost/benefit analysis by reducing the margin (making justification even more daunting).

Frankly I would love to see Amos make this kind of commitment; I think it would be a huge benefit to the hobby. But consider their previous IT projects and how they fared; they aren't exactly consider an early successful adaptor of technologies.
Don

From an article in the business section of today's Los Angeles Times:




http://www.latimes.com/business/la-...4-story.html

After every major storm, electric utilities lose revenue from their customers, sometimes for days. Few people die, and even fewer are fired.

This is not an air traffic control system, is it a stamp catalog number billing system. Yes, it can miss a few hours. And, if it proves unreliable, it can be improved.




Oh, no! Not The Little Guy! That smaller web site is already paying for hosting services, DNS registration, feedback form processing, credit card processing, etc. They can pay for using catalog numbers.




You seem to be unfamiliar with the way affiliate systems have worked for years. The Little Guy logs into their (for example) Amazon affiliate account, searches for the book they want to plug in exactly the same way you do and, once they find that book, they click on (the equivalent of) [copy this link to your clipboard]. Then, they paste that enormous, complex, gobbledy-gook link into their blog, book review, home page, whatever. Anybody who clicks on that link is tracked and, if they buy the book, The Little Guy gets a few pennies.

This is just the reverse of that process. If you do not think that the reverse is possible, please visit:

http://www.formmail.com/

http://www.surveyfactory.com/

Cheers,

Technically, I agree with Don. Furthermore, the audacity of Scott if they were to try to implement such a system would generate such a backlash, as to make such a risky and costly a move not very feasible for them. Forgive me if that language is a bit garbled. Hopefully my meaning comes through.