Do You Trust The Video Professor?

A while back a customer of mine asked me about the legitimacy of the Video Professor. For those of you who don’t know, the Video Professor is a series of computer training videos that are heavily advertised here in Charleston on TV, and more recently through popular social media sites Facebook.com and Myspace.com. My customer wanted to know if it was a good deal or not and if the videos were as helpful as advertised. I told him that while I had never seen any of the Video Professor branded materials, that I thought for some people it was a lot easier to learn certain concepts from a “live” video instructor than just a how-to book. In fact, I think CBT’s (computer based training – which are multimedia and interactive training sessions a computer) are sometimes better than classroom training as you can go at your own pace. It really depends on how you personally are able to consume and retain information.

What I never even thought of when he asked the question was the business model of a service like the Video Professor. I never looked further into how this company does its business because I am personally not the audience for this particular product. I did pick up from the TV commercials that it was similar to the Columbia House CD club that I got roped into once when I was a child. You may remember those – you got to pick 10 CD’s for a penny, and then you were sent a random CD every month along with a hefty bill (for an unemployed 13 year old). The trick was that you had to be very conscious of how the club worked and diligently mail in the title of the CD you really wanted every month and then remember to cancel you membership when you fulfilled the minimum requirement of full priced CD purchases. The problem was, no 13 year old I knew ever completed the program without getting a lot of CD’s they didn’t want or by getting their parents to bail them out. Nowadays, there are a lot of companies that use a similar model, but they always use your credit card! So instead of getting a piece of mail reminding you that you have an obligation to their service, it just shows up as a line item on your credit card bill. For me personally, that just wouldn’t work out. I would forget about it and continual get charged money for something I didn’t really need. I can’t imagine I’m not alone either, but that is just speculation. The big difference now is that you have an open forum called the internet to research any product before you make that impulse purchase.

With any product, you will find a lot of opinions that run the range of experiences with it. The truth is that the most vocal group are the ones that get burned by a product that does not live up to expectations. It becomes hard to filter through the negative minority to get a clear picture so you have to use a bit of common sense.

When I stumbled upon this article entitled “Video Professor Tries To Bully Washington Post, Fails”, it definitely piqued my interest. The author of the article, Michael Arrington, who is known lately for his crusade against social media gaming scams, has been doing a great job in my opinion of putting some of the more questionable internet business models under a microscope. It seems that according to Arrington, that while breaking no laws, the Video Professor purchasing model is quite confusing for the impulse buyer. The charges are not small either, ranging between $190 – $290 per product that are regularly sent to you if you do not opt out first!

In my opinion, it is a shame that the validity of the actual product is tainted by a business model that is associated with a bad experience I had with the old CD clubs 20 years ago. I for one would not recommend this product based on the subscription model alone. I feel that if the product was that good, people would buy more because they wanted it, not because the are obligated to. While I can’t say I don’t trust the content of the Video Professor, I can say that I don’t trust the business model of it.