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Readlang, my language reading site | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| SteveRidout Diglot Groupie Spain readlang.com Joined 4267 days ago 65 posts - 121 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 33 of 131 25 March 2013 at 11:50am | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks, I'll look into using that dictionary, the downside is that the page doesn't resize gracefully in a narrow panel like wordreference does, so there'll be a horizontal scrollbar which is a bit ugly, but I suppose it's better than nothing. :) As far as open sourcing goes. I like the idea of doing it for individual use but I'm a bit scared of other people/businesses hosting versions which will prevent me making money from it, I could use a licence which prohibits this but it still seems risky. I'm working on this full time at the moment in the hope that one day it'll provide enough to sustain continued development via user subscriptions (but currently signed up users will continue to have free access). So for now no, sorry, but perhaps I'll rethink in future. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lwtproject Pentaglot Senior Member Netherlands https://learning-wit Joined 4877 days ago 149 posts - 264 votes Speaks: French, Dutch*, German, English, Mandarin Studies: Italian | Message 34 of 131 25 March 2013 at 4:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't think that you will make a lot money out of such a language learning website. IMHO you will never earn so much money that all the hours of work will ever get paid. From my LWT Project, I can only say that I worked on it about five full months fulltime (around 1200 hours) in total. If one wants to earn about 30 Euros per hour, which is a rather low "IT salary", that would be 36,000 Euros. You need 300 customers paying 120 Euros per annum to have the initial investment payed. And that's only the beginning. There are server costs, you need a service desk, etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| SteveRidout Diglot Groupie Spain readlang.com Joined 4267 days ago 65 posts - 121 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 35 of 131 25 March 2013 at 5:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks for your honest opinion. You may well be right, it's the first time I've started a venture like this, and it's a bit of an experiment with no serious downside if it happens to fail. My goals are relatively modest, I don't need it to make a *lot* of money, your example of 36000 Euros per year actually sounds pretty good, especially since this could continue even if I wasn't improving the site. (In reality though, I have enough ideas that I'll *definitely* continue to improve it if it gets to that stage!) I'm thinking of charging something more like 1 or 2 euros per month, or more for more advanced features, since I think this is what I'd probably be willing to pay for such a service. So to reach your example numbers I'd need 3000 paying customers! But there are a huge number people in the world who could benefit from this, especially if it runs well on smart phones and tablets, and has easier access to content than it does currently. Am I deluded? :) Server costs should be pretty low, since a lot of the work is being done client side in the browser, and the back end is pretty lightweight, a JSON API running on Node.js and MongoDB. I'm curious if you ever envisaged making any money from LWT, or was it destined to be free and open source from the start? Sorry if this is a bit off topic for the forum, I'd love to continue the discussion in private if you're interested. Steve, steveridout@gmail.com 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5545 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 36 of 131 26 March 2013 at 3:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
From the moment I first saw the L***q website, I assumed that from then on, no self respecting language learning software would be able to do without a similar functionality, and that the owner of the site would become a zillionaire through licensing it to Rosetta Stone, but it doesn't seem to have happened yet.
Pricing of online services is weird. I'm sure Ive read utopian articles about how we should only be paying a few cents for services, because the billions of customers will make it still profitable, but things that aren't actually free always seem to me a bit on the expensive side, usually over $10 per month, which I guess is a nice round number, but if you use the service for a year, then you can end up paying quite a lot, perhaps more than alternatives, for example Linux distributions often are either free, or you pay for support, or a rcommended monthly donation, which means that after a year you've ended up paying more than for Windows. Anyway, the point is, it would be quite nice to see a site that actually was only charging $1 per month. Edited by schoenewaelder on 26 March 2013 at 3:11pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Light Newbie Canada Joined 4410 days ago 30 posts - 42 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 37 of 131 03 April 2013 at 12:46am | IP Logged | |||||
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Anybody else sign up and not able to log in? I've tried logging in a few times, nothing but failure. I'm almost sure I didn't make a typo, but even if I did there's no reset password option.
Neat site anyways. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| SteveRidout Diglot Groupie Spain readlang.com Joined 4267 days ago 65 posts - 121 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish | Message 38 of 131 03 April 2013 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes, it's tricky. People I've talked to say $1 or $2 per month is too low, that the biggest obstacle to overcome is for people to pay anything, and that it's better to charge $5 or $10 per month, maybe it's true but I prefer the low pricing option, it just seems fairer. Anyway, until I improve it enough to attract more free users it's all academic anyway!
Thanks for letting me know. I've added a password reset option now, so please give it a try and let me know if it continues to cause problems. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Yufina Newbie Finland Joined 4896 days ago 7 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 39 of 131 05 April 2013 at 3:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Looks really interesting. But I like to see more languages especially, korean or japanese.
Started just using RWT and really like it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6582 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 40 of 131 05 April 2013 at 4:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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