Irene, I understand you.
But in the internet is a very special culture and that we have not to forgot. The idea of the internet based on other criterias and you reach a special group of clients with the internet and you have to consider it. Otherwise you don’t reach the people.
I think it is really hard to get such a site going up to earn money with it. Market Prizes depends allways on supply and demand. There are a lot offers in the internet. LingQ is not the only offer. And to call up supply you first have to get attention. It is a very difficult business I think. And needs a lot of sure instinct to make the right decisions.
I see I have too less knowledge with this special culture in the internet 
In general, I agree with Vera. LingQ is a very different language learning tool, people need time to fully understand this. If they see too many limitations in the very beginning, maybe they give up too soon, without realizing the huge benefits of using LingQ.
Also, I realize that are a lot of people out there unable to pay even $10 a month, but I don’t think LingQ’s goal is to help poor people to learn languages (they never said it is!). On the contrary, they are a company searching for profits and the free accounts are not provided because they are good samaritans, but because this works as powerful advertisement.
Yes, Irene, this culture of not paying for anything in the internet is indeed a challenge. But I believe it is unavoidable. People will more and more be willing to pay only for services that prove to be unique and truly beneficial, not for content or disk space at all.
But LingQ is a tremendous service!! The challenge is to find effective ways to show this for people. Anyway, I guess Steve and Mark have a bunch of interesting ideas in their sleves to overcome these difficulties. I’m looking forward for seeing some of them at work!
A lot of issues here.
One small item for Greg on pronunciation. Learn the pronunciation from the context of your beginner material. Listen over and over. Listen for the rhythm of the language. Do not worry about pronouncing anything until you have heard lots of the language. I mean months.
With regard to the question of how LingQ can best generate enough revenue to pay for itself, this is indeed difficult and risky as Vera says.
Some considerations.
LingQ is the result of many years of work by quite a few people. It is complex. It is an integrated learning environment. We are at the beginning. We are continuing to develop and improve. Obviously we need revenue if we are to achieve our goals.
People will not pay if something is also offered free of charge. For example, we had hoped to let members “sell” their own content in our “Store”. No one buys content, if there is other content available free of charge. We had to change our plans.
There are lots of free sites on the Internet, free language exchange, free dictionaries and more. The advantage of LingQ, we feel, is that we combine so many elements, including an active community, which we are about to improve significantly quite soon.
Either LingQ has unique value to people or it does not. If it has no unique value it will not survive. If it has unique value, then the users will pay for it.
Very, very few of the people who register at LingQ get past 50 saved LingQs. This means we have to continue to work to make our site easier and more attractive. We also believe that the 5 content item limitation discourages people at an early stage. Yet there has to be some limitation or people will just use the site free of charge forever.
If we have a limit of between 300 and 500 saved LingQs, with the opportunity to continue by deleting words, this will still provide most people with a limit that they will never reach. The genuine learners will either join, or will live with the inconvenience of having to delete words. There will only be one limit, no higher limits for different levels. Members will be either in or not in.
Ultimately the goal is to have a thriving community, and as Vera says, whatever we do is a risk. Staying the way we are is also risky, since we cannot continue forever this way.
We do not believe that a site like LingQ can have enough traffic to rely on advertizing. We also do not like the “tipping jar” model, where some people pay while others do not. We may introduce a “tipping jar” it for content to enable members to provide extra rewards to those who have created good content. However, we do not believe it is a fair way to cover the costs of the site.
As the community grows, and as we improve the site, there will be more and more opportunities to earn points by helping others. Not all languages are offered at LingQ, although we intend to open it up to many more languages. Not all languages are equally in demand. So this is a little unfair, but we will have to see how it all works out.
As for people who cannot afford it, we really have to focus our efforts on those who can. Meanwhile, the community, the forum (probably including the language forums), with lost of advice and encouragement on language learning, all the audio and text content, the use of our functionality (albeit with a restriction) and more, will all be offered free, and anyone can take advantage. That is still a lot of value free of charge. The vast majority of language learners pay to go to school.
I think that our challenge is to tell more people about LingQ and to make the site more attractive. If we achieve that, $10 per month, with the opportunity to earn points by tutoring and creating content, will not be a major obstacle.
I believe LingQing, reading and listening to a transcript is what hooks people and that should remain free to a great degree. It should also be pushed and explained from the beginning. I know I didn’t even bother using the whole concept of “LingQing” properly until only very recently. I just used LingQ as a source for language content and I would print out the transcripts and download the content on to my iPod and pencil in translations on the printed transcript… —That is what hooked me!— as Steve instructed in some of his various youtube videos. That works and it works quite well. On the other hand, LingQing is just the more efficient way of achieving what can be done with notepad and windows media player. It’s really the inner core of the site and what makes it special. Otherwise there is almost no difference between using LingQ and using notepad and windows media player. So, in that respect, this “special” quality of LingQ - the “LingQing” is paramount in my opinion to hooking people in to using LingQ the way it was intended and which is a more efficient method than notepad/mediaplayer.
With that said, I am guessing that LingQ needs a much larger userbase to become a viable self-sustaining dot com, so apart from working out the various cut-off points for this/that/the other in premium paid-subscriber services, it will be all for naught if the userbase isn’t large enough to tap in a decent revenue stream.
Also as the number of avid LingQ supporters increase, so too will the userbase by things such as word of mouth. For example, I’ve mentioned LingQ to as many people as I have had conversations about language learning - even on the net itself. There is a student in Vietnam learning Vietnamese and last week I just had to mention Steve to her and she was quite amazed!
With a userbase an order of magnitude or two higher, I’m betting even an emaciated business model will still pull through big enough numbers to make a good profit.
A lot of what you say is right rsherfan and in our opinion this upcoming restriction change will make things less restrictive not more for free users and will give more incentive for our power users to become paying members. It will be less annoying and more fair than our current system and will certainly not affect the majority of our Free members at all.