Reading the replies, there are mixed views, but at the end of the day it has to be supported. How about leaving the videos free, but making the code available to purchase? Some of your examples take very little tweaking to put straight into applications and can/will save people time/money.

If you're a student or unwilling to pay, then you could just follow along with the video and type?

Set yourself up a store while you're at it and I'll buy a mug and t-shirt too Just kidding... No really, I would... Or would I?

Cheers

However, I think a pay wall could possibly (almost) kill this site. I have no idea what the average age of zendcasts visitors is, but I think a great deal of them are students. As a student, I would never pay this amount of money (and certainly not on a monthly basis). Particularly because most of the things explored on zendcasts are already done elsewhere on the net. The advantage of zendcasts is the nice screencast format, and of course the fact that all info is in one place (and not across many blogs).

Also, I would like to add that I thought zendcasts is based on the railscasts initiative. This would break the concept of this site.

Recently, I considered donating (haven't done it yet, though ). The last site layout featured a big donate button, did it not? Maybe you should promote donations more.

Advertising might help, but I don't really like that on websites...

Best option here is some kind of partnership I think. With whom? No idea...

I hate to get all businessy on it, your site is awesome and I would probably pay for it in either case, but if you're looking for this to be a job then it should have some sort of target to hit!

1 € for a screencast would be good, you've got a large audience, it could make some good benefits if all of us (your students :-) ) agree with that price level.
Once a screencast buyed, the number of views of it would not be limited, only the access to the resource would be priced, not the number of access.

The level of your audience is also , i presume, very different from one to another, and setting some level required tag on each screen cast would be appreciate if viewing casts is not free anymore, allowin users to choose depending on the level required.

A good point is that you are very clear through your explanations, making things easy to understand, even for not english based people, like me.

I hope you'll success in building this, free world is the greatest but we all have to make money... Your idea for pay per view is logical considering the success of your zend casts.

Bye :-)

as a student, i would prefer free tutorials

We all love getting stuff for free, but it takes time and effort to put this kind of resource up and keep it running, and I appreciate that.  So I would definitely vote yes and let those who decide it's worth it hang around. 

That's my 2c.

PS: I like your idea of having free content and premium content.  I think a lot of the older stuff should remain free.

That said, I'm not against the idea of paying for the content but what I am against is paying more for it simply because it comes in a video format.

If I were to pay, then I would want it on a per episode basis because not all of the topics are of interest to me.

I voted for a 14$/month. The problem today is that only a few ZendCasts are really instresting, I would be more intrested in ZendCasts that described more design patterns...with Zend Framework.

And if you were to introduce somekind of payment you need to increase the quality of the videos...technically speaking (Audio and Video quality).

If you want to charge people, you HAVE TO integrate a system where people can decide which episodes will be produced next. Either, you can give everybody some credit points to vote for different ideas, or you charge per episode and people can decide whether they want to view it or not.

A system with 14$ (CA or USD?)-a-month-subscriptions won't work if the content is not interesting to me; which is pretty likely in some periods. Plus, you will have to publish zendcasts on a more regular base, like 1 cast every week.

Please, make sure european customers can buy your services. Idk, doesn't PayPal swap EUR to USD/CA$ automatically ?

14$ would be about 9 - 9.5 Euros.

And the tiered approach makes a lot more sense than a 100% paid subscription model

I'm curious about what you mean when you suggest it should be better content.

Do you mean titling & music (a more polished look'n'feel) or more of a powerpoint driven education style?

For zendcasts $4 per video or make better content. Your screencasts are useful but not have proffesional education quality.

I think an advertising / sponsorship model is a possibility, especially since we're talking about enterprise development here (Zend isn't marketed towards mom and pop shops). I tried putting ads on the site awhile back and they looked bad and cheapened the content. If I find quality advertisers that are relevant to us as developers, then I'd consider it.

@philwinkle: I think that a 3-month membership instead of every month makes a lot of sense since its still a regular contribution, while not making the annual price exorbitant. Ultimately, I'm interested in best practices in software engineering and web architecture. The site works because when I publish videos, I also learn what I can do better in my own development.

The impetus for monetizing zendcasts is to provide resources so the site can grow and also so I don't need to freelance in order to focus more on building ZC.