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Chronological Thread  
  • From: Calvin Powers <powers AT attglobal.net>
  • To: "InterNetWorkers" <internetworkers AT franklin.oit.unc.edu>
  • Subject: Information as Commodity
  • Date: Tue, 02 Jan 2001 18:13:54 -0500

At 12:58 PM 1/2/2001 -0500, you wrote:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001224.html

Summary:
Offering free services on websites is not a sustainable business model, nor is advertising, which doesn't work on the Web. Most Internet companies are now pursuing an enterprise strategy to make money, but they'll soon begin turning to individual customers for revenue as well.



Hmmm, I can believe that offering free services on the net is not a sustainable model. However, there are cases where companies can offer a service for free because it helps them do R&D, beta testing, etc for services they hope to sell. For example, blogger.com and userland.com.

But I find it difficult to believe that sponsored web sites (i.e. sites with advertising) are not sustainable. Television is an extremely expensive media, production-wise, but I can get a lot of it for free. So why can't web sites sustain themselves with advertising? Is there something inherent in the technology that makes this model unsustainable?

Even with the above objections however, I can believe that more and more web sites are going to start charging for access. And in some cases, that would suit me ok. For example, I'm really into MyYahoo and all the other "free" services they offer in exchange for viewing ads. But I'd pay a small fee to get the same services without advertising.

Also, I'd pay good money to have a decent newspaper delivered to my e-mail box. I don't want teasers with links back to the web site. I want full text and articles. And I want it personalized to deliver to me the articles I'm interested in.

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Calvin Powers                                             current events
mailto:powers AT attglobal.net                          cultural phenomena
http://www.sff.net/people/powers                           true stories
"the revolution will not be televised"    http://www.StuckInTraffic.com/
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