Soon, we’ll be offering premium features for purchase — and we want to make sure the site stays useful while we do it, particularly for teachers!
I know this is going to be a little scary, talking about adding payment options to a site you’ve gotten used to being free. Well, what’s been free will stay free — you can still make blabbers and embed them in other websites, or let friends view them on our site — and we’re absolutely dedicated to keeping our site useful to educators. So don’t worry.
Here’s what we’re doing:
We’re trying to get the site to pay for itself, and that means having people pay for the bandwidth they use. For a single user (even a teacher with one account for multiple students), costs should be pretty low; for us, though, potentially footing the bill for millions of users is a little beyond our means. So, we’ll soon be offering, for a small fee, some brand new features, and some variations on what we already offer.
First off, we’ll be restricting free blabbers so that they’re ’smaller’, bandwidth-wise — fewer scenes and shorter audio. We’ll then have affordable premium membership options with much higher limits (only present so someone can’t make an infinitely large blabber and crash the system / run us out of business). We’re aiming to start with 1 minute 30 seconds per scene limits for free, 5 minutes per scene for premium, and we’ll adjust them from there as we get feedback from you folks.
Second, we’ll be offering blabber-to-video conversion at a small fee. We have a section in the FAQ explaining more about why blabbers aren’t already videos, but the important part is that doing the conversion lets you download a plain old video file that can be loaded by video editing programs, embedded into slideshows, or uploaded to other websites. In other words, after conversion, the blabber is yours to do with as you will! Premium memberships will include a good number of video conversions.
Third, we’ll be limiting the amount of data transfer off-site embeds can consume, which we’re calling embed bandwidth. We’ve actually always been limiting this, but now we’ll let you buy more if you’re consuming a lot — so if you’re using a blabber as the centerpiece of a high-traffic website, your traffic won’t run us out of business or break your blabbers. Premium memberships come with higher monthly allotments of embed bandwidth.
You’ll be able to buy the video conversion and embed bandwidth separately from memberships, and in bulk packs to make them even cheaper, but we’re aiming for our premium memberships to be the best value; premium memberships not only let you make longer blabbers with more scenes, and come with video conversions and a higher monthly embed bandwidth allowance, but also let you remove ads from the site!
So let us know what you think!