When costs for a particular product or server get prohibitively high, typically in a monopoly situation, it’s a great time for a startup to come in and level the playing field. Competition is the golden key to creating a price point that matches supply and demand.
Yesterday i reached out to a company i found online that offered movie time data and a cool affiliate program that could let my site visitors buy tickets, creating a nice affiliate revenue stream. In the ideal world, the data stream would be free, which would then increase the amount of tickets sold through a now increasing amount of affiliates. In this theoretical world, the movie producers would think logically and offer this data to anyone, knowing that more access to tickets = more sales = greater profit.
The pricing i received back from the company was somewhere between mind-blowing and ludicrous. $3,500 PER MONTH to access the data. That’s $42,000 a year. Absolutely ridiculous. Of course they also have a similarly crazy pricing plan where you pay $0.25 per screen per week. So for a typical 12 screen theatre, you pay $12/month just to see what times movies are playing. Now of course if you try to build any sort of national app that integrates a users geo-location, you’re looking at much more than $3,500 a month if paying on a per screen basement.
I’m sure somewhere in this company a sales guy is doing the math for us entrepreneurs – Why spend $15,000 a month by paying per screen when I can get you EVERY screen for just 12 easy payments per year of $3,500.
If anyone hears of a better alternative, somewhere in between scraping the data and paying through the roof for it, i’d love to hear from you.
