[meteorite-list] Meteorite Hunt Video

[Sterling K. Webb]

Hi,

    The economic bottom line is that the more specialized the subject of a
DVD and the smaller the number of people who might want to purchase it, the
more it will (and should) cost.
    There are, I'm told, about 850 members on the this List.  That's not the
total number of meteorite "nuts" in the world, but it's a substantial chunk
of them, so there are probably only about 1000 potential customers for any
meteorite DVD, so we're talking about 100 or possibly 200 sales most
probably.
    There are many, many thousands of people in the US who are, for example,
devoted to the enterprise of fishing for that leviathan of the inland
waters, the Catfish.  Go price catfish DVD's...
    They're $20, more or less, and are often discounted down as they age,
and I'm sure thousands of them are sold every year.  There certainly are
lots of them on the market.
    I only thought of catfish DVD's because recently a fellow from a near-by
town caught the World Record Catfish in the Mississippi River about
half-a-mile from where I live -- a 125 pound monster.  He had made
arrangements to sell the still-living beast for a goodly (but undisclosed
price) when it unexpectedly died.
    But he's selling a post capture DVD for $20!  To me, well, I might pause
to look at a big catfish for a minute or two, for free.  I certainly
wouldn't pay $20 to look at him for an hour, but I'm told the DVD's are
selling briskly.  It's all a matter of taste.
    Moving on to more esoteric tastes, gentlemen who fantasize about
cavorting with mermaids underwater can buy very specialized DVD's to assist
their fantasy in the $30 to $50 range.  And even the mermaid DVD market is a
much bigger market than the meteorite DVD market!  I guess the production
difficulty of underwater cavorting counts as a factor here, but it's nowhere
near the effort and cost required to get over to Oman and trek through that
elemental desert!
    Whether the trip was for the purpose of making a DVD or the DVD is
incidental to the trip, and all the other quibbles, are irrelevant, the
Original Steve Arnold can charge whatever he wants for a very specialized,
very small market production.  Economic logic suggests a high price, but the
market is so small that the question may be moot.
    It may come down to the question of deciding whether he wants to sell --
these are arbitrary examples, of course --  50 copies at $20, or 100 copies
at $10, or 33 copies at $30, which those of you with pencils or fingers may
have noticed is all pretty much the same thing.
    If he (or anybody else) wants to charge a lot for a short run DVD, maybe
they should be hunting for mermaids instead of meteorites.


Sterling K. Webb