The Death of ChinesePod

Chinese pod (http://chinesepod.com/)

Introduction

Chinese Pod is fun way of improving your "street-level" chinese listening. The banter-prone personalities are strong and you will probably love them or hate them (think morning radio). They range from the funny, intelligent and witty (John and Jenny) to the conceited, condescending and very annoying (Amber and Kenny). Until recently chinese pod was innovative because its base service was free of charge with the frilly features coming at a monthly rate. Accordingly CP garnered a small cult following and a regular base of lurkers and part-time users.

The changes

As of this week, years of free content will be stripped, new content will be pay only and the lesson community will be skinned to pay users only. A bloody big neo-liberal stick, PAY OR GET OUT, basically. Fair enough, it's their show and many of the hardcord users have rushed to CPod's defence and pointed to the "new content", the little carrots down the road. Videos, Iphone and all that jazz.

The cost/value

"This is not greedy! good business sense! Its only the cost of a cup of coffee every day (or however you want to dice it)!" The price deals range from Us$9 a month to $2999 (!) for 24 months. The first month where you can gather/access all the previous lessons is of course good value, although you could do this through their trial or download under creative commons.

But for me and possibly a lot of other people, I only have real interest in the upper-intermediate lessons, none of the other crap future or present. This level has around 10 lessons or so a month. running at around 10-15 minutes long each...so maybe 1.5 hours of total material for the month..for $US9...still good value? It depends on your usage i guess. But for casual/supplementary users who demand good value for what they want, watching chinese tv or following a 汉语口语 textbook seems like a better, cheaper alternative. I mean, how much should you expect to pay for banter?

Faulty business model

For me, word-of-mouth credibly, long-term lurker fans who come into the tent and a brillant community (stars member are being paid off with free membership) was the bedrocks for CP's booming success. How did it survive so well for 3 friggen years? There seems to be this blind push to EXPAND, DEVELOP THE BUSINESS and GIVE PAID USERS BETTER VALUE. But banning free-users is not going to improve the pod service and business expansion doesn't always work. The expansion is also based on the shaky premise that free users, when forced, will sign up with their credit cards. I would rather voluntarily pay than be force to pay, simple as that. Plus, i would never have heard about chinese pod, through my listening teacher, if it had not been free in the first place . I honestly believe in the previously-free-model as a way to make money. Furthermore, for me the site has great bread-and-butter pods, but the new video and grammar stuff is out of CP's niche and not interesting enough to warrant me coughing up more money.