Why We Decided to Make Our Beta Private

First, let us express our very sincere gratitude to the many wonderful users who joined our site since we launched our public beta on November 9th. You can still log in with the same username and password you obtained when you joined. If you're not a user and you're interested in joining our private beta, please fill out the application on the homepage and we'll get back to you shortly.

We launched our beta with the intention of gaining a small user community and learning from them as we simultaneously planned for our actual product launch in 2007. As we considered low-cost alternatives to getting the word out to recruit a few hundred users, we discovered PRWeb and decided to issue a press release. It cost a few hundred bucks. We sent it out on the afternoon of November 9th, and figured it would generate a few visits, mainly from press people who watched the wire. We fully expected to have to recruit our early users one-by-one, and this press release was an attempt to see if we could get any traction at all with people we didn't know.

You can imagine our surprise when the very next day Fast Company wrote about us. It was a major shock to run a vanity search on Google for Yepic and find a link to a publication we're huge fans of and read every day. It was a bigger shock to go to their homepage and find our name front and center. I'd just come home from a date with my wife and some friends and decided to see if the press release had had any effect. Wow! The next two weeks were eventful, to say the least. For starters, we got far more traffic than we had expected to get during our entire beta run (which we had planned to run for 6 months, or so). We also got blogged by a number of different bloggers and covered by a few other press outlets. Registrations, new articles, etc. all shot through the roof.

You'd think we'd be elated, right? We were, absolutely. Especially at the fact that the product actually stood up under the enormous spike in traffic we received. We also love the fact that so many people immediately get Yepic's business model and see it's potential. But we were also a little concerned, for a few reasons.

First, we're working on strategic partnerships for both content and extended functionality that will greatly enhance the experience of buying and selling user-generated content, and we've always viewed these partnerships and the content/functionality they bring with them as integral to the success of our launch. We started to get very concerned that people reading the coverage on Yepic would be inclined to think of our public beta offering as our best foot forward as opposed to an effort to gain some insight from a small user community. Our technology is only one leg of the stool: the other two are content and a strong author base, and those won't really appear in Yepic before next year.

We were also concerned that the attention we were receiving would give would-be competitors the opportunity to really dig in on our offering before we even had a chance to get behind it and give it the proper launch it deserves.

We hope you'll be understanding of our change in plans. Yepic is currently in discussions with lots of potential partners and everything you've seen till now and much, much more is on it's way in early 2007.

Keep coming back to our blog as we're now going to update much more frequently.

Will People Pay for User-Generated Content?

Will People Pay for User-Generated Content?

Whereas former attempts to define Yepic began with a discussion of why users would be willing to pay for UGC, we've now found information that lots of people already do, and in prolific quantities. Per a Market Research tool eBay recently released, more than 600 user-generated articles priced from $1-20 have sold in the last few hours. Oh, and that was just in the "self-employment" category, which is one of 5 sub-categories in the "How-to" category, which is one of 3 categories in the "Information Products" category, which is buried in the "Everything Else" category on eBay. These information products sell everywhere on the site. I found some on how to get Disney Fast Passes that would work all day without any wait periods over in the category that displays tickets to Disneyland.

The fascinating thing about these articles is that they aren't masterpieces that have been collectively massaged by dozens of very, very active Wikipedians . . . they're rather ordinary pieces of content with titles like "Get ex girlfriend/boyfriend back - REVERSE BREAKUP NOW." That one was written by lucbecks7, who has an average 1-star rating from just 39 users. He sold his article today at approximately 1:44 p.m. MST for $8.97.

Fascinating, huh? What's more fascinating is that whoever bought Luc's article--which required, per Luc's pitch, the download of an eBook file from a secure site . . . an eBook which requires a reader, which the consumer might also have to download and install--could have run a search on Google for terms like "REVERSE BREAKUP NOW" and "get your ex back" and found these sites (1, 2, 3, 4, 5; there were many more, as you might imagine) in less than 5 minutes.

Why didn't they? I'm not sure. Perhaps they did. This much we do know: They were willing to pay a guy named Luc with mediocre eBay seller ratings almost $10 for his thoughts on the subject.

Why? Boy, now that's a tricky question that I need to work on in another post. Why do we ever buy anything the way we do? And just how much time and effort are we really willing to put into pre-purchase homework when it comes to $10? $5? $1? I mean, if the shoe fits . . .

A friend of mine spent all of 5 minutes searching for Easy-Bake oven recipes on the Internet, and when he found an eBay article for $3, he whipped out his credit card and bought it. "I didn't give it a moment's thought," he said. I did some searching on Yahoo Answers and found what appeared to be several legitimate recipes for Easy Bake ovens, and they were free. My friend is a professional blogger and a computer programmer with a graduate degree in computer programming from the University of Chicago. He's very technical and savvy on search and other technologies. Why didn't he keep searching? Why did he pay?

The answer deserves more thorough consideration, but I suppose the big factors here are low-cost convenience, saved time, and greater relevance and specificity. The information we want right when we want it for a reasonable price is really a good deal for most people. Sure, there are folks who find it unthinkable to spend money for something they can get with a little elbow grease. These folks probably also change their own oil and wash their own cars. But folks like me find the exchange of cash for right-now service more than worth it in most cases, and we often find that the pros who provide the service we've paid for did a much better job than we would have on our own.

But there's much more at play here than just avoiding the sizable "search tax," I think. Paid articles are very likely better when it comes to relevancy and value. Why? I think it's pretty simple: when I'm creating content recreationally--this is the way MOST of the UGC on the web is created, click here to read more on that subject--here's what I'm not doing: thinking about exactly what you want to know. What makes me do that? Competition for your $$, that's what.

The point is, Yepic doesn't just make sense because current Info Capitalists have a rough go of it selling stuff on the web today (click here to read more about that); Yepic makes sense because an info marketplace is going to dramatically improve the quality of information products on the web today!