Chris Kresser: I’m afraid there’s no good answer to that question. It’s one that I certainly have thought a fair amount about with ADAPT and my other programs. There’s kind of a balance because the more you protect your content from theft, the less convenient and accessible it is for the people who are paying for it. If you have everything password protected and locked up and people have to enter passwords and stuff every time they open things, it’s a real pain and it’s not a good user experience. On the other hand, if everything is just downloadable completely from your website, it does increase the risk that people are going to share it and not pay for it. So the decision that I have made mostly has been to just take that risk because I want people to have the best possible user experience that they can have. Most retail businesses, like if you own a store, you just write into your budget a certain level of employee and consumer theft. That’s just part of the cost of doing business. There are even some people that have suggested a more kind of radical view that sharing of digital content can actually benefit you, even if people haven’t paid for it, that if they consume some of your content that they haven’t paid for and they have a good experience, they might actually be more likely to become a paying customer for something else in the future. I don’t know about that. I have mixed feelings about it. I think, in general, people who don’t pay for things may not be likely to pay for something else in the future. But I think that it also happens, that someone could not pay for something and then say, Hey, this is good stuff, and I want to pay to support this work.
It’s not a black-and-white area. There’s a lot of gray. And there aren’t really any good solutions that I’m aware of that help provide a really good experience for customers that can also protect your content. The exception—and I think we’re going to be doing this next year for ADAPT—is it costs a little money, but you can create apps for video and audio content. Using ADAPT as an example, you would essentially be consuming the video and audio content using an app on your mobile device, your phone or your iPad, rather than downloading them. So they wouldn’t be downloadable, but you could watch them on the computer within the web portal, and then the mobile issue is solved by just being able to access them through an app. That, I think, at least goes a ways. That doesn’t prevent sharing of PDFs and things like that, but it does prevent downloading and sharing of audio and video content.