Slashdot Mirror
How Long Can The Free Services Stay Free?
A nameless cretin writes: "Yahoo and
Bigfoot
are both noted for providing free services.
They both seem to be planning to add fees for selected services.
Yahoo's "Yahoo! by Phone" service,
also known as "1-800-MY-YAHOO",
provides various information services via voice phone, including the
ability to retrieve e-mail. According to
this page
they are planning to charge a monthly subscription fee beginning
May 7, 2001.
Bigfoot provides a variety of e-mail services, such as relaying and
filtering. They do not provide mail boxes. Although some of their
pages
still indicate their services are free, some member pages
(requiring member login) indicate a $19.99 annual subscription fee will
be required for many of their services.
Although I am disappointed in these changes, I would like to thank them
for the service they have provided us. I hope they are able strengthen
themselves financially and continue to exist. I also hope they explore
new means of providing free service." Any other free-beer services you've noticed being shut down or leaning suspiciously of late? It's been rather nice to have so many free email accounts in the meantime, eh?
What are you talking about? The only way internet ads are going to be as successful as TV ads are if (a) the mediums merge or (b) internet ads go intrusive.
Oh, but J. Random User HATES the ad banners and popups. But guess what? Most people that are advertising on TV get WAY more exposure than they would on the Internet. And guess what, they're intrusive ads.
Take a smaller company, and internet advertising seems more affordable, but they run into a brick wall--they're advertising to people who don't want to spend money.
TV audiences spend money; internet audiences complain that they shouldn't have to. Except for buying stuff from ThinkGeek.
Other services like personal data. I am confident that free email will be around forever, if for no other reason than to collect the email addresses of all your acquaintences.
Think about it. Someone sends email to all their friends and family. The company that offers the 'free' service suddenly acquires a whole bunch of valid email addresses. The company then sells these email addresses to spammers.
The same business model applies to online greeting cards, send your friend this story news reports, and just about any other 'free' give-us-an-email-address service.
This model will dry up if the masses ever get smart enough to give their real addresses only to trusted people. The masses are not this smart, and for that I thank them :).
the best way to get free email is to get a friend with their own website to give you a free email address on their site. you know who youre dealing with, dont have to worry about any 'all your everything are belong to microsoft' type service agreements, and it can be used where a hotmail account could not because many sites would not allow you to do things from a free email account (on account of the lack of accountability). --Crank
Any just who is going to pay for that service?
You assume that just cuz companies start charging, that enough customers will pay to sustain the business. You are wrong.
Napster can't operate without charging fees? No worries. They'll disappear because no on will pay them. And when they're gone, as in nature when a dominant animal goes extinct, something else will pop up to take its place and flourish.
Newsflash! The net existed for a great many years before advertising was even legal on the net (pre 1994). And it will again after the venture capitalists/whiners are dead and gone.
The very existance of GNU proves beyond a reasonable doubt that people will still make good things available for free over the net. Music, images, etc. will still be out there. Even if only on users' personal web pages. And again, as before, search engines, like the early archie and veronica, will index it, again, all for free.
"Imminent death of the net predicted."
It's the same old shit all over again. The IT bubble guys, I guess, don't know how old that above quote really is.
Those of you with a subscription to WiReD or Time or something. Go and get a few issues from last year and put them in a stack. Now take the same issues for this year and make a seperate stack.
Notice something? This year's stack is significantly smaller. Why, you ask?
Everyone is making less money from ad revenue this year. The first thing companies cut when they foresee financial problem (since everyone does say The Economy Is Slowing!) is cut their advertising budgets.
Sure, this sucks for dot-coms that make their money from ads, but it also sucks for everyone that makes money from ads. The same arguments you could use for Yahoo's business model collapsing could be used for Time magazine. See, the difference here is that Yahoo is now painfully aware of how dependent they are on advertising. They have the ability to use multiple models, whereas Time does not have that luxury.
The dot coms are better. Stop crying and start buying them while they're so low. :)
That was one of the funniest posts I've read in a while. (If it wasn't meant to be funny then it is even more hysterical.) I'm glad it was moderated up so that it caught my attention.
-Derek
Yes, but the problem I have is that they've changed what's free and what's not. Some time ago, I set up a bigfoot web redirection service. That web site has now moved to a different server, so I went to update the redirection, only to find that I now have to pay for it. So my options are to either stick with the outdated URL, or change it to the new one, and pay a monthly fee in perpetuity. I've chosen the former option, with a pit of PHP on my old server doing the redirection to the new server...
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
It sounds like a partial restatement of the Cluetrain manifesto. At least the first point is 100% cluetrain.
In a moment of distraction, I submitted this reply before having finished to proof-read it.
Any reference to "OneStop" in the above should be replaced with "1stUp".
1stUp was the backbone of many free internet services.
OneStop (.net) is a totally irrelevant ISP.
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
we will see more and more pay services
Or the plain and simple elimination of those services. Take a look at OneStop: they were the backbone of *many* free internet access services, like what AltaVista was using. 1stUp would make it's revenues off a cut of the adds displayed by the client software onto the user's machine.
When the add market started to erode, OneStop saw that they wouldn't be able to expand, and simply stopped the service with about a month forewarning. AltaVista warned it's users two weeks in advance. Many other providers simply did not.
My sister was one of those AltaVista users, and she was quite pissed at this. but, as I explained to her, they owed her nothing, as she has benefited from their service free of charge for many months.
You get what you pay for, in the end. My browser blocks adds too, because I'm sick of the screaming colors and abrasive distraction they bring to web pages. But this may, how long before Slashdot requires a login fee for anyone with less than 20 karma points?
I already pay for a descent web access (cable). Will it come down, eventually, to pay for Slashdot?
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
http://www.faxme.co.uk is going to paid-for too... this is definately a trend.
In the end it should be a good thing, as most of the free services ultimately have no path to profit or even being able to sustain themselves.
You're missing the point. I'm not talking about the kind of ads, but rather the companies that advertise.
Old fashioned trademark ads from big companies are way to uncommon, and they're the only ones who can actually afford it.
It's pretty obvious what's wrong with the ads on the net, isn't it? A site that isn't making any money has ads on it to cover some expenses, the ads are banners for other sites that are also not making any money and so the circle is complete.
The money initially pumped into these companies is running out, so there is no one left to pay for the banners.
The Internet needs big companies to realize that it's a great place to advertise! We need Coca Cola ads, shampoo banners and all the crap we're used to from watching TV. Those are the ads that actually bring some real value to the advertisers as they need their trademark to be displayed everywhere you go.
It is time for the Internet to grow up. It's not going to be pretty, but it has to.
Your scenarios are silly. I'm connected to the Internet 24/7 with a flat-rate ISDN connection. Whether my or my ISP's sendmail is connecting to "George"'s server doesn't make a blind bit of difference. But that's irrelevant, because you are missing the point. I don't pay, or at least I don't think I pay, for "Internet services". If I wanted that, I could use AOL, no? I pay for a connection to the Internet. If I can only send mail via to designated servers, then I don't have a proper Internet connection. What next? Would you support ISPs filtering packets, and only allowing the services they think I "need"? It's the same thing. And please don't give me bullshit about "competition": a) I'm in Germany, we ain't got none of that there competition; b) as the players get bigger in the ISP field, the "competition" will go away anyways. My original point stands: I want a proper Internet host; the DUL respondes, "too bad: fuck off and buy a T-1 line". To hell with that. Who died and made Paul Vixie King of the Internet?
The real problem with all these e-mail forwarding services is spam. Their measures against it are simply inadequate -- I stopped using both bigfoot and then pobox because of their reliance on the MAPS DUL (dial up list). I object to this list on principle: The DUL is only and explicitly for the purpose of denying access based on the degree of connection the users can afford; but it doesn't even stop a lot of spam. The only effective anti-spam measure I've used is brightmail. Why free e-mail provides can't simply license that technology (which is what brightmail's business plan amounts to), I don't know.
I can't see any changes in the Bigfoot pricing model, at least since a few years ago when I signed up. They have a few premium services that are chargeable, but not all the premium services are for-pay in any case.
I would actually be happier to pay $20 to $40 per year for email forwarding - my main worry is that Bigfoot will go bust, since they have no visible means of support, and my email address will no longer be usable...
Just a wild-ass guess, but I'd assume Yahoo! pays at least $0.10-$0.20 for the average call to this service. There is no way to support that with ad revenue, even in the best of times, even at rates several times that of similar media (such as radio). On the other hand, you can serve hundreds or thousands of customers via the web for the same money. You could probably pay for it with ad revenue even in the current depressed ad market.
Don't read too much into this. Free 800 number service wouldn't have lasted that long even if the dot-com phenomenon hadn't imploded.
Things that quicly come to mind, are the phone network (build it, switches are desigined to last 20 years, and just provide power, and you done...), and hydro power (build a dam, install a turbine and a generator and youve got free electricity in the spring forever...).
And it also works for non 'network' like services... R&D costs for pharmicitals is high, but the per unit manufacture cost is low as an example.
Your argument seems to be that the price of things should be related to the cost of production. In a market driven system the price of things is related to what the market can bare. If that greater then the cost of the item, the company stays alive. And if its less, the company dies.
Right now the goind theroy is that the price the market can bare is $0 for these online services. When the free services either die, or are forced into some kind of payment, the high quality content will dry up.
It remains to be seen weather or not the maket can bare a non-zero price on these things...
Well, my ISP's news server has been down for weeks (and maybe forever!), so I've been using it quite a bit.
Compared to Deja, groups.google is extremely fast. The onlything I would like to see is slashdot-style nested threads, but I'm sure that they are working on something. (DejaNews' outline was nice, but verry slow).
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Well, they're fuzzy on the final Windows application, but it looks like that they wanted to keep the CGI/Module architecture in place instead of going to a runtime environment such as NET or Java. This makes sense because when you are already running 400 webservers, speed is a greater issue than shorter development cycles.
/. flamefest.
You're right that they didn't need to upgrade (even though Slashdot told me they were "About to Collapse Under Load"!) But any document where the "Business Justification" section fails to mention that they own both Hotmail and Windows and the obvious PR problem there, and instead blabbers about Unicode etc, really shouldn't be worthy of a
It is interesting that they are using Interix in production, tho.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Although I generally agree with most of what you said, I think you ignore some equally large underlying issues. However, the only thing that I wish to comment on is the mindset that "the majority of people do not wish to pay for products or services, and if threatened with this, will move to another product or service." People will pay for products and services if the only way they can get it (or something of like quality) is by paying for it. To the extent that this is true online, it largely owes to the fact that billions of dollars in venture capital and IPO monies were being spent subsidizing this mind grab effort. Once the vast majority of these internet businesses cut their losses (they either do or die), customers will simply have a choice between paying or getting nothing. Neither will customers keep expecting "free" services online, since hardly anyone is going to be providing them in the months and years to come.
In other words, I believe that a good number of these Internet businesses will start charging money, directly or indirectly, in the next year or two and have some success (about as much as can be expected, given that so many schemes were ridiculous). Furthermore, I firmly believe that the overinflation of the Internet by VCs, investment bankers, and the like has actually done far more to harm Internet businesses then it has to help. When the party line in the financial community is to grow grow grow at all costs, it essentially forced more stable strategies out the window. If you were a startup that needed capital, you had to accept that philosophy. Even if you were free from having to raise money, the problem was that all of your competitors were following this strategy, drowning out your more sober plans by essentially buying customers; very few startups can afford to go without significant revenue for long.
But TV (and radio?) have a trusted ratings system - clickthrough is an attempt to replicate that ratings system for websites.
Maybe if the website viewing statistics were believed more...
stay frosty and alert
Or parents buys a game for a birthday/christmas/whatever present. The kids figure out what they want by reading the free game sites, which don't necessarily have to be contant promoters of any piece of crap like the big, secure, ad-based or magazine-backed commercial sites. The parents probably don't want to shell out $5 or more a month just so their kids can find out what to spend another $50 on.
Developers usually don't reply as AC.
Well, the majority of gamers are kids, and the majority of kids either do not have jobs that pay enough to spend money on a game news site or just do not have jobs at all. So, you're message to them was basically that you are shutting them out.
Developers usually have a LOT of stuff being used on their computer at once: compilers/IDEs, several browser instances, help files, flowchart/modeling/UML tools, email, various utilities (internal development programs, version control, third-party stuff, release utiltiies, etc). We're shoving internal company data all around. Faster computers, more memory, larger monitors, and faster networks dramatically increase our productivity.
Now, the place for the older machines is in the testing department. The testers are supposed to reflect a selection of supported customer configurations, so thats where the minimum system requirements boundary should be tested. It is far, far easier to tone down an application developed on a high-end machine than to build up an application on old hardware.
...are well advised to go straight to the source. Rather than asking provoking questions of people who probably don't know the correct answer anyway, it's always best to get your infromation staight from the horse's mouth.
If you want to learn about Red Hat Linux, why not
- Try looking first at the Red Hat web site. There you will find a
- Support Page, which contains a link to the
- New To Linux page, where you can begin to educate yourself by reading their
- Introduction to Linux, as well as many other useful and informative documents.
Try it -- it's really easy, and fun too!Very interesting and worthy of a front-page story IMHO, you should submit it (and probably already have I imagine). I'm not holding my breath expecting to see it posted, though. I thought the "Business Justification" section was very interesting:
An interesting read, though.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Sure, if you or I wanted to make a web-based email service the initial cost would be cheap. But you're not going to get the traffic necessary to support an ad-based revenue model unless you have plenty of users. And then when you have plenty of users, you're going to need more web servers and more bandwidth, so your costs are going to go up. That's why there's been consolidation among the free web-mail providers along with some just shutting down altogether or selling certain domain names that they promised their users that they could have for life (leaving many angry email users behind in the process).
As an aside, and likely to generate flames, Microsoft recently posted a case study of Hotmail's conversion from FreeBSD to Windows 2000.
Cheers,
This might be good news for Bigfoot users, since if they start charging, maybe the rest of us can start thinking about taking them out of our procmail spamfilters.
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Because efficient programmers are much, much more important than efficient software.
It is a simple, repeately proven fact that it is far quicker to develop certain classes of applications in Java than in C++.
The performance differences between the two are irrelevant; you can throw more hardware at a slow program to make it faster. Throwing more programmers at a late project (because the tools don't work for the job) make it later and probably buggier (due to incomplete understanding of what you're fixing/implementing).
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Ok, I'll bite. (Yes, I know I'm a sucker)
When I bought my new computer, I had
Windows, Internet Explorer, and Office pre-installed (for free)
Not quite. You paid for it, you just don't know you paid for it. Microsoft, whose biggest market is OEMs, like the company that made your computer, sold the software to your machine's manufacturer. The manufacturer's cost of the software, plus a small markup, is then built in to the cost of your machine. Had Windows and Office not been pre-installed on the machine, your machine would have been cheaper. By how much, I can't tell you, because Microsoft has a different deal with each OEM based on sales volume.
RedHat does not develop Linux. For the most part, Linux is developed by a worldwide team of volunteer programmers scattered across the continents and the 'Net. RedHat *does* provide some funding for open source projects and actually employs a few of those developers (including Alan Cox), but so does Corel (they have been funding wine development), Caldera (I forget what they fund), and other companies that don't even make a Linux distro like IBM, Compaq, and others. Nobody is "stealing" RedHat's work because all the work they and other companies do on Linux and other open source software is licensed under an open source license like the GPL. See the Open Source Initiative's website for more information on the open source licenses like the GPL. There is a difference between free as in speech vs. free as in beer. Linux is free as in speech.
My journal has hot
RedHat Linux and all Linux distributions are free as in speech...read this page or this page to find out what the difference is... the developers of Linux (Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, et al.) decided out of the goodness of their hearts to donate their software to the public. Companies like RedHat make money by selling things like technical support and services. Selling CDs is just to get into the door, really.
My journal has hot
I think Operamail uses the same webmail system.
MailAndNews.com seemed a bit slow for me when I checked.
As they say, TANSTAAFK and you have to be honest enough to yourself and any potential users. Be up-front and even transparent enough to put out to your users (and get them on your side) to show that your irreducible costs are $x/month and that *YOU* are currently acting as Santa Claus.
... what is it that you can offer them? And how can you use it to offset most of your costs (especially your stress levels). Again hypothetically speaking, if you don't have real-capital from a revenue stream you have to look at alternatives ... in this case I would nominate *STREET CRED*. Kids (again assuming that is your target demographic) like boasting that they are better than x in something. How can x be achieved only from your site, and how can you convince another company that x is worth sponsoring. Again you have to think about your business model but I would suggest things like offering to act to 2nd tier games companies beta-testing programs (bounty scheme where they pay $xxx directly for each found bug), creating web-easter eggs to be sublicensed, web playback of advanced (you'd have to make an agreement with equivalent in Europe and Asia to spread the time-zone differential) playing techniques, offer to host chat rooms and provide sanitised market intelligence about future trends. This requires putting yourself into the shoes of a test-dreictor, coach, scout-master and what-else. It's also good to find yourself a niche that bigger companies find hard to duplicate as you are only a one-person band at this stage and it is too easy for the AOLers/MSNBC/Yahoos to muscle in on your customer base. Again, do yolur accounting sums and work out what meta-model you are trying to apply (resouce model, distribution model, service model, etc ...).
...
You're in a tactically unpalatable demographic as from the appearance of your site, it caters towards the pre-teen market which is notoriously short of change. However, I would suggest doing a little thinking inside the cube
Best of luck
LL
OK let's look at it from 2 points of view, you (as person) and from the client. Basically in this day and age, you get paid either for your time (mythical 9-5), task ($$/page writing), your talent (what you know that others don't/can't), or your teleprescence (film-stars/Tiger Wood). So you ask to ask yourself, given that the computer is a tool, how does it enhance your performance?
... and how will building your longterm reputation will bring you the outcome you desire.
The client's point of view is even more important as it defines what custom you take and what ones you would reject. Put yourself in their shoes, if they had to hire you as an employee, what skills would you bring to add value to what they do? How can you demonstrate that without your time/skills/knowledge/stellar personality etc, they would be worse off?
It is not easy as you ned to do some very careful critical thinking but once you've identified your role, you can then work out the business model (costs/value/risks/etc). For example, (hypothetically speaking) if you believe your skills are in programming/development with some judgement as technological consultant to these community groups, then you can market yourself as a fractional CTO. Ie if you have 20 organisations, ask that you expect to spend 1 day/fornight workly sole with their technological infostructure (information infrastucture) which would be equivalent to 5% of a CTO salary at market rates. You then have to pay the costs of the server and bandwidth against this income but then that's just a matter of accounting and tax deductions plus an incentive to keep the costs down.
The key point is to ask yourself what business you are in
LL
If your developers have to have new computers every few months, chances are you're going to be shipping products that are unusuable by most of your customers. If you give two groups of developers identical specs, and one group has the latest Pentium III/IV/whatever systems with hundreds of megabytes of RAM, 21" monitors, and a network spewing Cerenkov radiation, and the other group has 486 and Pentium systems stuffed with a few 10's of megabytes of RAM, monitors that can actually be carried by one person, and a network that just might be as fast as sneaker-net, well, you're going to get two very different-looking products that do the same thing.
Kind of. Certainly the team on the 486's will be forced to write more efficient software, but you have to ask yourself if it's really needed? If efficient software is necessary, explain java.
The more important point is that the team on 486's will ship way late. This has something to do with compilers being slower, the network being a dog etc. And one hell of a lot to do with pissed off software engineers not being arsed to do anything or leaving to go somewhere with better gear.
Never underestimate the power of 21" monitor.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
The service provided long distance in exchange for listening to an ad at the beginning of the call. 30 second ad gave you 2 minutes of long distance. I used the service often, and it came in very handy at payfones. According to their site they seem to be still running, but for the past month or so, I can't get through the number--at first it was disconnected, now it just rings forever. So it looks like they're gone.
witold.org
I had the same worries, and was starting to have some odd problems with Bigfoot (some mail sent to me was bounced by Bigfoot!!).
So, I just switched to pobox. I think it's $15 per year for basic service, and offers mail forwarding just as Bigfoot does - the only thing I wish it would do is let me forward email to multiple addresses, but I can live without that for more stable service.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You have to pay anyway. It's just that time == money. You choose your currency.
----------------------------------------------
the pun is mightier than the sword
Anywho provides many of the same services as 555-1212...and AFAIK, it's all still free...
Personally, if it's a service that's important to me, I'd rather know they're using a business model that a) will last and b) will reward them for providing good service. An ad-supported service is at the mercy of the advertisers. If they don't do well, then the site goes under. (Not to mention, that if you're beholden to the advertisers, you suddenly have a vested interest in not hosting content the advertisers don't like.)
But beyond that, an ad-supported site makes more money when it's better at getting ads in your face. It only needs to provide good enough service to keep eyeballs there. If they need to keep my $20/month or whatever, they're more motivated to make sure the thing works well.
Bottom line... I hope some of the sites I use -- including Yahoo -- start making more money directly off users and rely less on advertising. The only question is whether it will work. It'll be interesting to see how Salon's experiment works out.
Cheers,
Dave
I think companies like Yahoo will always have basic free services, but I can see them rapidly moving towards subscription based "power user" services, which a certain class of customer (like myself) will be more than willing to pay for.
Regards,
jc
"Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not." --George Bernard
If the following item from NTK is true, it all sounds a little suspect from Bigfoot's end. I certainly haven't been told about forwarding limits and the like:
From NTK (http://www.ntk.net) this week:
DESPAIR for remaining BIGFOOT users, whose "free e-mail
forwarding for life" looks to have an expectancy of somewhat
less than five years. "Times have gotten tough for Internet
companies such as ours", the company weasels, and goes on to
say they're spreading that "tough" sensation by limiting
mail forwarding to 25 messages a day. And even then,
subscribers have to provide "demographic information"
before the forwarding restarts. Given that most people
receive about that much mail in "GREAT INKJET DEALS" alone,
you can understand that the company would introduce this
change gently. But, so far, as far as we can tell, they
haven't mailed users, or put the policy change on its
Website - they just stuck it in the autoresponder FAQ at
help@bigfoot.com. How stealthily desperate can you get?
http://www.bigfoot.com/
I've just checked Bigfoot via help@bigfoot.com, and I got:
Our basic Forwarding service is free, but if you wish to use it, you will need to provide us with some demographic information, so that we may send you periodic emails from our partner companies. You will then be able to have up to 25 emails forwarded daily.
we went through a similar time with dialup bulletin board systems; sysops discovered that they couldn't afford to provide 12 incoming lines and 40,000 messages bases without charging access fees. in most cases, when presented with having to pay, users bailed. some people considered the cost worth it, and of course some of the nicer systems survived. out of all that, though, people got used to paying for worldwide email and discussion groups, and good file downloads. kinda sounds similar to paying for internet access, doesn't it?
some of the elements of services like yahoo phone (reading email over the phone, especially) have a good chance of surviving, just as some of the elements of old commercial bbs services survived. the fact that yahoo is going to charge for the phone service is a small part of a bigger picture. how long will it be before you can check your email at work by calling to check your voice mail? probably not too long.
if you're interested in using and keeping track of free services, I maintain a resource list at laslocomm.net.
Karma only matters to me now and zen.
Donations are a good idea, especially for relatively small communities, I think. I know a BBS (on the internet, not dial-up) here that is run on donations. They don't just ask for money, they also throw parties every now and then, where the users get a chance to meet the people they have been talking to in real life. They make some money with these parties (even though the drinks are cheap and you don't pay for entrance), which is enough for them to keep going.
So yes, donations can work, depending on how you do it, and how your userbase is structured.
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
I'd rather pay for the site than buy what is advertised ... Because paying the people who run the site is much more direct (and noticeable - how do they know the impact of online ads on sales, anyway?), and might keep the site completely free of ads, which I would really like for some of the more interesting sites.
EagerEyes.org: Visualization and Visual Communication
This is patentely wrong! The MAPS DUL does not discriminate against dial-up users, as they can send mail to whomever they want. Nor do the users of the DUL discriminate. If you want to send mail to someone, use your ISP's mailservers! That's what they are there for.
Consider: if you send email to George, and George's mailserver is down for a day because of Jethro and his backhoe, what happens:
Scenario A - you are sending the mail directly: Your client must connect every hour or so, and try to get to George's server, tying up your modem and phone line.
Scenario B - you are sending via your ISP's mailserver: You connect and send the message to your ISP's server. It then tries every hour until they get George's connection fixed, and you go about your merry way.
Which of these scenarios makes more sense?
Come on, I was on a dial-up for years, and I just tell my boxen to forward to my ISP's mailserver. It's not that hard, it saves me bandwidth, it just makes sense.
And for the argument that your ISP's mailservers suck: If your ISP cannot run its mailservers reliably, is your connection going to be any more reliable?
And for the argument that you wish to use somebody else's mailserver to receive mail: YOU CAN. Using your ISP's server to SEND your mail doesn't prevent you from retrieving your mail from some other server: that's why mail goes OUT on SMTP and comes IN on POP3/IMAP!
Lastly, for the argument that the DUL doesn't reduce SPAM: My ISP just went to using DUL filtering. My spam went from ten a day to one every couple of days.
www.eFax.com are spammers
The quality of trolls has really gone down lately.
"You can catch flies till the cows come home, but wasps are a totally different kettle of fish."
As so many free services get into trouble now, I think chances for offering quality services for a fee get better, which might benefit all who value their time and thus are prepared to pay a little for a better signal/noise ratio.
Dejanews is a good example: It was good, but not economically viable. Because of the "everything must be free" mentality, it was not yet relaunched as a for-pay service. Soon it might, and I would gladly pay a reasonable fee for the invaluable resource that a good usenet archive is. (groups.google.com is no good, is incomparable to the good old dejanews).
Subscriptions are cumbersome however, because when there are so many service to use you would have so many subscriptions to keep track of (and to cancel in time). What I would like is a system where I could subscribe to some services that I use heavily, and to pay-per-view for some that I would use only occasionally (like buying a separate newspaper as opposed to taking a daily subscription). However, until a single worldwide system for micropayments is established, this seems impossible.
or people misuse free-beer services....
linuxstart(www.linuxstart.com) had to close down it's free mail coz some people did something of that sort, don't remember exactly. it was fast and used to be pretty convienient.
I use bigfoot since '97 (seems like forever:-) and they always (as far as I remember) had services that you'd have to pay for...
erik
...all excited, don't know why...
As an employee of a software company, I can whole-heartedly agree with #4. With R&D, shipping, customer care in the south and everything else (most management, sales, marketing, accounting, etc) in California, the natural cultural clash of markeing/sales v. engineering is exacerbated by the cultural clash of "left coast" v. "bible belt". It's REALLY ugly.
---
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
2.5. You expressly permit and authorize Juno to
The big advertisers don't see the Net (yet) as a valid medium for developing brands.
Maybe ThinkGeek isn't a big advertiser, but seeing their adverts at the top of many /. pages really has developed their brand to me.
You're not fooling anyone!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I had been a user of free email services since I graduated from university (during university time, I am using the university email account). I was with Hotmail, but had switched to Yahoo mail when Hotmail became too slow for me to use. I owned a permanent forwarding address with IEEE since I am an IEEE member, so switching email provider for me is just a jiffy. There are still tonnes of free email available even if big names like Yahoo!, Bigfoot and Hotmail decided to go subscription based.
why is it, then, so painful to shell out $50 or so bucks for something that's actually valuable?
hey, i like free stuff as much as the next, but there's something wrong when we are willing to pay for things *advertised* as being worth paying for -- but yet, we hate to pay for things with no advertising budget because they have no advertisting budget to convince us of worth!
oh yeah, it's the addiction thing - so programmers need to make software that is addictive, right?
go figure... we buy nintendo etc without bitching about that too, because it's advertised to be that way
all i can say is thank god i quit smoking
<---[singularity sig]
iName also provide forwarding, and they seem to me to be pretty ubiquitous ... they do provide a *ton* of domains so it might not always be obvious that it's iName behind the thing (cheerful.com, engineer.com, writeme.com). I think they belong to Mail.com now. I've been using a writeme.com address nearly since I had email, precisely for the forwarding -- so I could keep a constant address even when my "real" address changed.
I agree that it's a very useful feature of email. I'd leave out the "web" bit, though; my writeme.com email is never read through a web interface but forwarded to a real POP3 account where I can access it with my favourite MUA and read it offline, organise it easily into folders, and so on.
Esli epei etot cumprenan, shris soa Sfaha.
I think I'll go click on the ads in the newpaper.
two words:
Arbitron ratings
That, together with the sheer volume of people listening to traditional radio compared to internet stations means that advertising in traditional radio will be a worthwhile endeavor for a long time to come.
The only way for free services, from companies that want to make a profit, to remain free is good effective advertising. You really only have two choices; in your face advertising that must be played before you can continue, pay-per services which you pay a service fee for services used. I personally would rather have the advertising, since I don't have much money to be paying for every service I use, not only that, fee's will "lower" the number of service providers on the internet to a small group compaired to today's numbers, since only the popular companies will be making money.
Regardless of the poor condition of the advertising market, I can't believe that free email is about to go extinct. The cost of providing email access is so minimal -- and going down every day -- that even $0.01 CPM advertising would probably cover it.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
My question to the /. community is: Are people interested in this email-and-other-info-by-phone technology?
I have absolutley no interest in it and it seems like I'm the only one. Why sit there and listen through all my emails when I can go to a computer and _read_ them all in a quarter of the time. And if its important, I have a cell phone... ?? It just seems like a lot of companies are pushing for this and its one of the few things I don't see any demand for
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
The story submitter states:
. I hope they are able strengthen themselves financially and continue to exist. I also hope they explore new means of providing free service.
This is the major problem with the mentality that the braindead Stanford MBAs foisted on the dotcomm world and the users of the Web. A business that spends money to give away its core product away for free is doomed to failure. The notable exception to this rule is television but even then quite recently they were all money losing ventures until the rise of cheap reality-television and talk shows which garnered high ratings without being expensive to produce.
The mentality of giving things away for free fucked the dotcomm world which in turn fucked the Tech industry which in turn fucked the economy. the sooner we lose it the sooner we'll be on our road to recovery.
--
The distinguising feature of their service is that the connection between your browser and their site is SSL encrypted. If I'm checking mail from a public place, I figure it's much more likely that someone has slapped a sniffer on the public terminals than it is that someone's done the same on the networks at Pop3Now or my ISP (or in between), so that added bit of security is a nice thing to have. They also allow checking of up to 5 accounts, but with the page design using more than one or two can slow things down.
-- fencepost
fencepost
just a little off
--
--
I like to watch.
The next logical question is, why are you still here?
--
--
I like to watch.
Hear hear! This is a point that I never realised, but was completely obvious after it was pointed out to me a few weeks ago. Since I never new it, and its been ranked to a 5 here, hopefully a few more people have ticked ...
Ads on the net should attract an equivalent cost on a site compared with its equivalent rating TV or radio show!
I am a Linux user, and I have paid for the RedHat Linux Distibution multiple times. I've always found RH's distro to be a decent balance between being easy to use, and able to get stuff done. Its worth the money, though now its more convienient for me to just download the newest version (a fast net connection is to blame
Enter the realm of Open Source. In this model, you download the source code for a program (which yes, is often free, but subject to license isssues), which means that you are privy to anything and everything the program does. So is anyone else who gets the source.
Red Hat Linux conforms to the Open Source model, and the source code is all available. It makes no difference what RedHat Linux is used for, because that is beside the point. If there are bugs or security issues that need to be worked out, they are done so in a timely and professional manner. Why? Because everyone can see/edit/mangle the source!
See a pattern here? In one sense, it could be said that RedHat shouldn't be trusted.... shouldn't be trusted any more (or less) than any other Open Source distro. Since they use the same distribution (as in GPL) methods, their level of trust has to be assessed by basically knowing the intentions of the company... just like with anything else.
<nitpick> Oh, and freeware is not technically what RedHat is. RedHat would be better descibed as an open-source project than freeware. Freeware is commonly known as readily available software (no charge), but the source is not available.
What could possibly hurt the security of the American people more than giving our own government the ability to hide its
Recently I've been struggling to figure out the answer to this question on my site - just when we started to make some money, almost enough to break even, the banner ad money dropped through the floor.
One possible service has been in Flashlink (http://www.flashlink.com), a system which has a series of member web sites (focused on computer/console gaming) that offer news, reviews, walkthroughs, etc. The catch? You have to pay $3.50 a month to access the web sites. That's not the amazing thing - the amazing thing is that its starting to make money.
I'm sure the fellow who runs Flashlink won't mind me quoting from his email to me:
The point? While free services in some way will always be around (search engines, some major news sites that can operate the web site as a loss to advertise their TV/Cable operations (like CNN)), it appears that people are beginning to recognize that there are things they have to pay for.
Pornography, for all the jokes we like to make about it, has been profitable on the Internet. Do they charge you money? Sure - but you pay because you can't get the information they have anywhere else. They provide a service some people want, and someone is always willing to pay, because they already know that porn isn't free - the second a site gets too popular, and hits skyrocket, and the bandwidth costs are too much for most ISP's to handle without asking for more money to operate.
Other sites that have been free for years will have to start charging for their services. Will people complain? Yeah - I mean, why pay Flashlink $3.50 a month for information they can get for free other places. But if the information is of a high enough quality (like exclusive game walkthroughs you can't find anywhere else, and excuse me for focusing on the game industry because that's what I'm into), people will pay. Would people pay for Tom's Hardware of Anandtech? Most would bitch and moan - but I'm willing to bed that for the quality of reviews/in depth information sites like that provide, there's enough people that would pay that would make it profitible.
Here's one last thought then I'll shut up. Linux is free - I like it, I use it. But for support, I either have to figure it out for myself or pay someone else to help me - and that's how the Linux industry proposes to make money. Web sites are going through the same evolution. Some things will be free, others you'll pay for. People have mentioned the need for "big advertising" (Coke/Pepsi, Levi) to get into Net ads - but I'd rather make money the "old fashioned way" - by selling something people want to pay for rather than having to prostitute myself. "I love playing Serious Sam - and speaking of serious, I love Coke!"
I'm curious to see how it goes. Things are going to start to get interesting as we figure out how to make it all work.
Of course, I could be wrong.
John "Dark Paladin" Hummel
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
Tom Vu!?
Hah! Loser...
Anyway, as you said "The very internet that you love so much is now going after you wallet. "
No, the very Internet I love is coming back...
Less commercial clap-trap, more useful discussion, is what I'd like to see.
My pick for best free site on the Internet? The Motley Fool, hands down.
Word.
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
MailAndNews.com is also great. Free POP3, IMAP4, and web access... plus (for now, at least), 60 minutes of email over the phone (great for travelling). I've had accounts with them since '97 (although this account is from '99). They had server problems about 3 weeks ago... first downtime I've seen in 4 years (RAID problems). Other than that... highly recommended. I personally have 6 accounts with them... it's an awesome service.
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
They have targeted ads. Ask for driving directions.
I dunno. All my sites have good placement in the major search engines, and I've never paid anybody a dime for it. I just submit them to one or two of the big engines, wait for a few people to find them and link to them, and let spidering do the work.
I think perhaps a lot of companies are using the same logic-- feeling like theyve now gotten people used to it and now they can ask for money. I suppose whether it works or not will come down to two things:
Because the snark was a...
...used to be the most accurate place on the web to get phone and address information. They updated their database every month or so (compared to some online directories which still have me listed under my old phone number which expired two years ago) and even had snazzy features like reverse lookup.
I noticed a few days ago that their services now require a registered account that only includes a limited number of lookups per month.
It's a shame since I used to use them exclusively for distant relatives phone numbers and the like.
I guess now i'll have to use Ameritech's or Yahoo's online directories.
*sigh*
Come on, Tinkler, Tink!!
Hello,
I was actually trying to give an example of what kind of product you would get when you developed in a state-of-the-art, bleeding-edge environment, versus a very "trailing-edge" one, so to speak.
Developers usually need multiple computers to develop and debug their software on, and at least one of these computers should match whatever the target environment is, so the developer can benchmark the performance and see if it is matches the spec..
(As an aside, I am not a developer; my background is in support and the usual type of "programming" I do involves scripting and macro languages. So please keep that in mind when reading my responses.)
My understanding is that the Java programming language was designed primarily with cross-platform compatibility in mind, and that while efficiency is an important goal of Java's design, it is not the primary goal.
I am not sure if a product developed on "trailing edge" systems will neccessarily ship late. If their design is simpler than the team using the "bleeding edge"equipment, then perhaps it will ship at the same time, or even earlier.
Aryeh Goretsky
- - -
Dexter is a good dog.
I am a former employee of a "dot-com", company which was closed by its parent company, so this is somewhat dear to me. And painful.
The company I worked for gave away its product for free to home users while pursuing "branding" (OEM) deals with other companies for increased eyeball count andhopefullysome revenue.
It didn't work.
While I will be the first to admit the banner emplacement in our product was poorly-implemented (one of the ways we intended to generate revenue), the sad truth of the matter is that the majority of people do not wish to pay for products or services, and if threatened with this, will move to another product or service. And as for deals with other companies, well, most of them were in the same situation.
The minority of the user base who are willing to pay for the product or service are usually not large enough to sustain the company. And OEM deals with companies with the same problem does not help, either. Instead, your own costs increase to support the new users you've just gained. And when money starts getting tight, one of the first things which gets cutor at least frozenis the support budget.
I've had plenty of time to ponder what went wrong (e.g., I still haven't found employment), and have come up with the following list of pitfalls we didn't avoid:
Do not lie to, mislead, or hide information from your customers. If you intend to turn a free product or service into a commercial one, let them know right up front that one day that might occur.
Your customers are your reality check. Not any sycophants you might be surrounded with, boards of directors, or venture capitalists. Listen to your customers. Within reason, do what they tell you. It could be that one suggestion, with a little polishing, might be just the thing to monetize your product or service.
As a corollary, I'm aghast at the number of companies which need to outsource market research/customer feedback activities. Why can't you ask your customers directly, or, for that matter, the folks who interact daily with them, the customer service reps, technical support engineers, account managers, and so forth? Are you afraid you are going to hear lies if you ask your customers or employees, and that the feedback you get is only valid if it is "massaged" though a third party? Blah.
Human beings are social animals, and need to interact with other people. No amount of videoconferencing, conference calls, email, or instant messaging is going to change that. And allowing employees to remain faceless and anonymous to each other is a great way to install fear and loathing in each other.
If you've outgrown your building and need to move activities into different offices that's fine; it means you're probably doing something right. However, don't put them in different cities, or, God-forbid, different states.
Before you start laughing like a hyena, keep in mind the same is true for developers. If your developers have to have new computers every few months, chances are you're going to be shipping products that are unusuable by most of your customers. If you give two groups of developers identical specs, and one group has the latest Pentium III/IV/whatever systems with hundreds of megabytes of RAM, 21" monitors, and a network spewing Cerenkov radiation, and the other group has 486 and Pentium systems stuffed with a few 10's of megabytes of RAM, monitors that can actually be carried by one person, and a network that just might be as fast as sneaker-net, well, you're going to get two very different-looking products that do the same thing. Which do you think your customers would rather use? The software that forces them to do massive infrastructure upgrades, or the one that blasts along with the occasional sonic boom? I know which one I'd rather use.
So, in a nutshell, if you respect and listen to your customers and your employees, develop products that people are willing to pay for, and spend your money wisely, you'll probablyand there's a fairly big "if-factor" in there do okay.
Aryeh Goretsky
- - -
- - -
Dexter is a good dog.
Sure, we'd all love to continue receiving free services but the simple fact of the matter is that since the majority of us hate banner ads and the like, revenue has to be made somewhere. People (and I am not without blame) tend to forget that there are people behind these services with families to feed and bills to pay and until someone can find a feasible way to keep these things free, we just have to deal with it.
Velox Versutus Vigilans
I completely agree with you and completely disagree. Honestly, 90% of e"sites" should go the way of the dinosaurs.
Tonight I was reading a story on www.news.com about a larger e"site" called www.listen.com (why haven't I heard of any of these *Larger* sites before ?).. So I thought I would take a look at listen.com. Well, nothing really caught my attention, except that it seems like just any other e"business" site that I've been to before, ie. chokfull-o-links and small typeface lettering, a feeling of being overwhelmed and not really knowing where to go.
So anyways I click on "free" music link littered about somewhere in the page.. which takes me to another page, click on another link which will apparently give me "free" mp3 music,.. Well the third or fourth page is located at amazon.com.. Okay, so here is the link to the music, "CLICK"
"Access to the requested Liquid Audio media is restricted to certain countries."
Well thats fine and dandy after wading through four or five pages of recursive crap. So I go back to listen.com, click on "Free Carl Cox MP3" or whatever it is.. this is great, Carl Cox is the king of DJ's "Cant wait to get his latest mp3 !!" So after another couple of minutes chasing the carrot above my head I finally get a link to the music, in big bold letters "DOWNLOAD MP3" or some such shit (MP3 was highlighted in big bold blue letters)... So i download, here is what i get..
carlcox_phuture2000hybridremix.rmp
oh for christs sake! That is no more an mp3 is than a chihuahua is a doberman. I'd love to call my volkswagen a cadillac, sure both are cars, but for fucks sakeone is a rattling piece of shit on its last gasp of air, and the other is a well engineered automobile.
Frankly the experience was lousy, there is no value in listen.com, its misleading its users ontop of that, the lack of value I reiterate.
I hope listen.com goes bye-bye, it should, it deserves it, I hope its fate is approaching soon, bye bye bye bye bye bye.
Why should I plunk down an annual subscription of $40 or $50 to pay for a valueless site ? I want something in return just like an investor would expect some dividends from gambling on a stock, I'm looking for the same thing in a different form.
Napster? Sure I'd pay for it, You know I would.
BTW: Why is liquidaudio (wtf is it anyways) restricted from Canada ?
Fuck esites. Did I say I agree with you ? Actually I dont, Suck it.
The cost is borne because it is truely advertising costs. If they didn't get those people to use the free services, they wouldn't have as many hits and could not command such a premium for advertising. I believe there will always be free services for as long as there is an internet.
DanH
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
Cav Pilot's Reference Page
UNIX - Not just for Vestal Virgins anymore
I noticed that IGN has added a subscription to their site and will be moving a good portion of their now-free content behind it.
Cest la vie...
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
Uhh... no. The point is that many gamers don't really have the money to afford their pastime. They may be scrimping and saving (or begging and pleading) to get the $50 required for their next game. They can't afford even $5 extra per month, especially for online content that isn't a necessary cost. These gamers are understandably disappointed when a free resource they've come to depend on suddenly turns commercial; effectively that content is now off-limits to them, which is an even worse feeling than when the content is not there at all.
> Except for our core group of supporters (5% or
> so of all registered members), people are almost
> definately opposed to paying for content online.
5% is an INCREDIBLE return... most non-net marketing efforts are considered highly successful at 1-2%
...so think of your initial site as a marketing campaign. Crunch the numbers and see if that 5% can really support you. You'll lose some of that 5% who won't REALLY pay, and you'll gain some of the 95% who will reluctantly pay. But if you can survive by charging that 5% you're in business.
The only reason a company offers something for free is to raise their profile so that they can sell some profitable services, whether it's eyeball-time (ads) or other services.
Sometimes it happens that their initial business plan fails because a smaller percentage of the public opted for the "pay" services than the company in question expected. It's certainly fair play to add new "pay" features, and it's even fair play for a company to turn some of its "free" services into "pay" services as long as appropriate notice is given.
I honestly don't expect my Bigfoot account to be around forever, nor my Hotmail account... They don't owe me anything in that regard, except for common courtesy. Problem is that we tend to get wrapped up into a sense of entitlement once we get habituated to something...
Of course, that's just MY opinion, and I'm often wrong. (Just as my ex-girlfriends...)
Ureach provided an excellent service. They would give you a toll-free number (877/888) and you would be able to get voicemail, read emails, listen to voicemail over the email, forward it. I had it for about two years with 60 minutes free per-month, and they decided to stop all free services. It's a shame that all these nice services that you get really used to end up closing down and try to charge you. I guess its just a big marketing scheme.
Look at Linux developers such a Torvalds. They have full time jobs and work on Linux in the evenings and on weekends. Granted software development only costs time, but time is indeed valuable. I would suggest that rather than spending time and other resources to locate additional funding, just continue to pay for the hosting yourself... so long as it doesn't start cutting into your budget too deeply.
Time, money... they're both resources. Just because money is physical object (often paper or pieces of metal) doesn't make it "more valuable" than time. Besides, you're only given 24 hours each day... money you can earn more of and even save and borrow.
Just something to think about.
>Any other free-beer services you've noticed being shut down
>or leaning suspiciously of late?
1) Photopoint is stopping free picture hosting. Normally I think these sites are useless but they allowed you to link to your pictures from other sites. Very useful for UBB forums. This relates to #2.
2) The ability to link to a picture hosted on a "free web hosting service" from another site. Again, I used to use this feature on UBB forums as you can't upload a picture onto most of 'em. Geocities blocked this type of access several months ago, Tripod followed suit. The rest are doing it as soon as they find out about it.
This may be the first time that a telephone system has been slashdotted.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Personally, I don't think things like free email are ever going to become non-free. Services like Hotmail may begin to limit usage (You have to log in every 60 days now for the account to stay active. Maybe it'll go to 30 days?)
One service that still exists, and I can't understand how it's survived, is TellMe. The 1-800-555-Tell service that's like an uber version of Yahoo's. It's been completely free for a while now, and as far as I know the only company that's been advertising on it is AT&T (probably to lower their phone bill costs). I actually use the service pretty often when I'm away from the computer (check up on New Jersey Devils scores and the weather), but for how much longer? How are they making any money?
- I don't care if they globalize against free speech. All my best free thoughts are done in my head.
This is a silly thing to say.
Saying that free services can no longer continue because people consumed them doesn't make sense. If people had not been "leechers", and had instead paid for the free services, then they would not really have been free (a "moral duty" to pay is still a duty to pay) and the internet would already have been "going for the wallet".
PC Mail is disabling many of their e-mail services now due to financial difficulty. I used to have an account boltronics@pcgeek.net which I really liked, but it has since shut down. PC Mail's only income (as far as I know of) was through bannar ads.
It's GNU/Linux dammit!
but in context the great period of the internet free lunch is going away. Banner Ads are likely to become the net equivalent of highway bill board signs for effectiveness, for example. We will have alot of services whose main purpose in life is to collect marketing data.
(I still think that we should all enter in the marketing data for our favorite politician when filling out online survey forms. This would probably help out vs spammers no end [insert smile here])
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
One thing on yahoo has done is if you want to get email for them using POP3 you have to agree to recieve advertising from them.
Doh
The problem with paying is not that I'm cheap, it is because it is so difficult. You have to put your credit card number in. Your address, which I'm think they will sell. Make sure you don't agree to recieve spam because of confusion check boxes.
Would you like us not to send you daily deals!
Maybe Yahoo has an answer with paydirect
One thing these email services can do is charge a micropayment on sending email. Like every month yourfirst 5 emails are free but as you send more email the price goes up. But after 1000 it is 10 dollars per email. The great thing is this makes it difficult on spammers.
I know they will just use something else. But good, yahoo and bigfoot don't want these spammers using their servers.
- How wide their bandwidth is
- How many users they can handle
- How many simultaneous mySQL/PHP apps they can run
So, if you don't think about a free service as a finality, you've got a chance to make money out of it (and in this case, with no banners, ads, etc.).--
Trolling using another account since 2005.
One service that took this approach is Crosswinds.net which hosts free email addresses (POP3/Webmail hybrid) and gives unlimited homepage-space (I only use the mail). They have an absolute no-SPAM policy which is why I stick to them even with the occasional outage.
Last year they started to have financial trouble due to the lost of revenue in ad-sales and they did a "plead" during christmas time. Needless to say, I was one of the first that contributed... If I had waited 2 weeks longer, I would have gotten a T-shirt, but what the heck.
Anyway, if they keep in bussiness, I'm pretty sure I will donate again around christmas next year.
So perhaps in your case donations are the way to go. I wish you good luck on with your website (I'll check it out when not at work).
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
The result? They get to keep most of the advertising cash they recieve.
the requisite link
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
As a web developer, I spend a lot of time interacting with search engines. In the past months, a lot of the big name engines like Excite! and Altavista have switched towards a pay-per-submission model.
AV, for example, wants you to spend TWO HUNDRED dollars to get listed in their directory with LookSmart. And those bills don't guarantee anything other than that your site will be "reviewed" to see whether or not it "qualifies" for inclusion. You can still submit to AV for free, but only after jumping through hoops. They generate a random GIF and you have to type in the characters contained inside, before you can submit... And even then, your "code" is only good for 5 URLs. If you want to submit more, you have to generate a new GIF and type in the new code. They're doing their best to make free submission a huge pain in the ass, especially if you have a lot of URLs.
I wouldn't be surprised (though I'd be rather disappointed) if the day comes when you can't submit to any search engine without paying a fee.
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
>Any other free-beer services you've noticed being shut down
>or leaning suspiciously of late?
MailStart (www.mailstart.com) used to be the most useful site around. It would let you check any POP3 account, read your mail, reply to the messages, etc. through their web interface. The ads on their site were, surprisingly, quite non-intrusive. They recently closed down their free services.
On the brighter side, it only took me about 5 minutes to install a PHP script that does the same thing. Sure we're used to getting a lot of things for free, but if those places go under or start charging fees, quite a few of those services can be replaced with "do it yourself" projects.
I miss MailStart, though.
Shaun
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Banner ads are not the only form of net-advertising. I'd be happy to see everyone figure that one out.
Advertising is more effective, if people are forced to view them, for example full screen before entering a service/site.
That shouldn't make you hate the product, as the advertiser of the product actually pays for the service for you.
You can argue the semantics all you like, the bottom line is banner ads don't seem to be making anyone any money. And while some companies that put ads on TV and radio go out of business, I'll wager that more companies that employ banner ads for their advertising go under more often. The recent dot-com carnage of late is evidence enough of that. The important thing to realize in all of this is that advertising creates business for companies, unless you are an advertising firm it is not the way you make money. Companies like yahoo need to realize their business is providing content, and that's what they have to sell to make money. It's their product, it's what people come to their site for, they don't come for the ads. Traditional media is more successful at employing ads because their viewer base is larger. Virtually every home in this country has a TV, a newspaper, and a magazine in it. Not every home is lucky enough to have a computer, let alone one with internet access.
Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here
Thank Bigfoot? Give me a break. What am I thanking them for? For being the #1 return email address in spam?
The quickest most effective spam filter you can create is to delete all emails containing bigfoot.com. But don't delete all emails with bigfoot in them as you may miss that email warning you they are about to re-play the Six Million Dollar Man Episode featuring bigfoot.
Chet
Free services will disappear one second after the invention/establishment of micropayment infrastructure. Most people will pay "just one penny" for most services. As we all know, once there is considerable acceptance, alternatives will vanish (c.f. browser war). Those controlling this infrastructure/technology will quickly be richer than B.G.
P.S. micropayment does not necessarily mean that the amounts are small or stay small. The word is just appeasement policy.
So like the ad market is down, but ITS NOT EXTINCT.
They will probably have to go for a split (free/charge) model for different services..
Yahoo basic directory would be supported by ads.
Deluxe directory would be subsriber only.
This sig space tolet, reasonable rate.
A lot of internet companies based themselves on the "We're-free-because-advertising-will-pay-for-it-al l model "
Everyone just assumed that since it worked for T.V. that it would work on the internet also...
No one ever stopped to think that we all hate commercials on T.V. (except for Super Bowl Night!) and are basically forced to sit through them. Thankfully, we're not forced to click on anything on the internet and can avoid being force-fed all together. If a site does force you, well we turn off our javascripting or just plain don't go there.
I think that in the end, sure some sites with excellent content will survive.... thinkgeek.com comes to mind. They have stuff I want, so I go there and buy it!
All these companies we see as free will have to start charging for services one way or another. The information will always be free, the services won't. Just my $.02
Linuxrunner
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
Yahoo & Bigfot were the only two big services who provided forwarding. I consider this to be the one most important feature of free web-e-mail. Too bad it's gonna be gone...
I run a free community hosting service. I've developed the system myself, and I pay for the increasingly pricey server myself. The site is and will probably stay free of ad banners, but I would like to keep the service free of charge anyway.
What am I to do? I can't say I feel like I have much in common with large corporations like Yahoo and Bigfoot, but I'm having the same problem as they are. Does anyone have any ideas that might help me avoid taking their path and charge monthly fees for my service?
(This would have been an Ask Slashdot, but that section is in my humble opinion turning into a farce..)
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
No, I wouldn't say that they don't work. Look at the adult website industry. Obviously, banner ads DO work. There are adult webmasters who pull in millions a year. It's just that people in the more 'traditional' web industries haven't figured out how to make them work well (yet). And Yahoo IS making some money on ads. It's true that they're hurting, but they're certainly not down and out yet. The key to banner advertising is to advertise useful products, and to have a very large user base. Just like a free newspaper with 1000 readers can't stay afloat, neither can a web site.
Well, I'd argue that Tv/radio systems aren't even that good. Neilsens take a very small sample, then extrapolate. On the Net, even if they don't click, you can definately say x number of people viewed an ad. Again, the comparisons aren't equivalent yet, and until the people who buy advertising understand that, Net advertising will be a bit behind.
They take 50% of the (non-porn only) market as it exists now. The market is still very young. It'll get there. Generally, a whole industry doesn't mature in a year or two. Some would say that the Net isn't even mainstream yet in many places outside of the US and Europe.
Well, how about Internet Radio? Sites like http://www.sonicnet.com offer a TON of free radio stations. They have banners along with a few traditional radio ads. Will they be smart enough to know that while the banners may not show much revenue, that they can still sell ads like traditional radio stations? The advertisers on traditional radio stations get NO statistics whatsoever. Ever the listening audience is just a rough estimate. Sonicnet can at least say for sure "we had x number of people here your ad today".
Well, what about BIG advertisers, like Coca-Cola? Do you go into Wendy's and say, "I'd like a Coke because of the ad I saw last night."? No. That's simple brand recognition. The big advertisers don't see the Net (yet) as a valid medium for developing brands. When they do, the Net will advertise the same as TV/Radio/Print, and the researchers will target Net advertising in the same way they target more 'traditional' media. You've got to give it a while. This is a TOTALLY new medium that's only been largely popular for a year or two, and still isn't nearly as widespread as TV, although it will be soon.
No, Internet ads ARE effective. To say that they're ineffective as compared to TV/Radio/Print is comparing apples and oranges. With Net ads, people are trying to track direct clickthroughs. There's virtually no consideration given to mindshare or branding. With TV/Radio/Print, it's ALL about mindshare and branding. There is NO clickthrough to measure. People buy those ads, and look at their sales, and see if they're going up after an ad campaign. Ad companies need to start to think the same way for the Net. Just because somebody doesn't click on an ad (I don't click on any TV ads) doesn't mean that they're not effective. Hell, or you can think the other way, and say that there is no direct way to measure traditional advertising at all (other than 'Tell us where you saw our ad when you come in to our store!'), so it's TV/Radio/Print advertising that's totally ineffective.
Is accepting Government aid stealing because it is free (or because the taxpayers or industries are paying for it)?
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
IS the best Dang Free e-mail account out there.
You can use Imap and use a program on your own computer, or Check it through Http.
It has no ads whatsoever, and is being ran as a free service by the people who own Netware, and the only problem is its down about once a month because they keep their servers upgraded with the Beta Stuff to test it out.
So, this is a free service that will most likely stay free, because it benefits the company.
Switching services as soon as a provider starts charging for services is not the answer. At the most basic level, companies provide these services for free because they are trying to establish a base of user to whom they hope to charge for services or they want to sell advertising.
/. The service here is free, but who provides the service? The motto is "news for nerds", but the content typically is narrowly focused on linux, open source, free software and similar ideas - which is a more narrow focus than they had several years ago. Why is this? Does it have anything to do with the fact that the owner of /. is in the linux business, i.e. if linux were to fade away, they would be out of business? /. is a great service, but it is a self-serving service.
/., so this service can remain free? Considering that I like /. and I would like to see it stick around, perhaps I will go look for something to buy as soon as I post this comment.
The linux community likes things to be 'free', as in beer and in speech. However, the free beer model doesn't work as well for hardware and services as it does for software. If an individual wants to make a contribution to 'free' software, where free refers to the cost (regardless of which license they prefer), then there is no cost involved for the user. They are volunteering their time - which does not require a cash outlay.
For free services on the net, which are typically provided by businesses, someone must pay for servers, bandwidth and people to keep the whole thing up and running. Depending upon the number of users of the service, this can become exceeding expensive. Businesses aren't charities, so in the end, they need the ability to generate money from the free services. The revenue can come from banner ads, subscription fees, or perhaps the service provides awareness of their other products which will lead to increased sales. However, in the end, there must be a financial justification for providing the service.
Consider
I see a lot of post here complaining about the evils of banner ads. Should I ignore the 'Think Geek' banner that is flashing incesantly at the top of my screen right now? Or, should I go check out their products and perhaps buy something of interest so they will continue to provide financial support for
In the end, someone must pay the bills, and that requires cash, and if there is no cash generation, then the service will end. While services may end, the open source revolution will remain, because the cost of participation is time, not money.
"Microsoft has made computing accessible to a population who would otherwise not be able to use computers" - B. Kernigha
Let's just go through this again in the hope that someone gets a clue: The Internet is a communications medium, not a storefront. It might be a marketplace, but it definitely is not a mall.
Neither the WWW nor the Internet at large was designed for e-commerce, they were designed so that people could exchange information easily. It so happens that doing business consists mostly of exchanging information, so the internet facilitates that. However, the model by which the dot-com craze was financed was the outdated TV model, which is dependent not on an exchange of information between equals, but on good old one-to-many mass-marketing. That just doesn't work
So, the glitzy services go under. Those remaining that have value to customers will survive, either by offering an online service so good, people are willing to pay, or by adding value to an offline product, thus being good advertising in and of themselves (and thus staying free).
Death of the Internet predicted. Film at 11.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
MailStart is (was?) good, but for God's sake don't send your mother to StartMail to check her email. She'll be treated to 6 or 8 popup porn pages. Same with StarMail.
Evil is the money of root.
evrything comes with a price attached ... u want sites to remain free click on the ads and buy their products occasionally...
You clicked on a banner ad?? YOU MORON!! That's only going to encourage them!
the problem with internet ads is that they aren't focused. Most of the time the content of the website doesn't have anything to do with the ads on the site. Why would I want car insurance or long distance phone services if I visit espn sports? Slashdot seems to do a good job matching ads with content. I've even clicked a few interesting ones myself.
After all, Yahoo has to figure out some way to make up for all that lost porn money!
I am the founder of a completely free technical support community - but it has no big business behind the site. The internet is great, because it allows 'community freebies' to be globally accessible [such as protonic.com], but it doesn't change the basic premise which investors want - a service that generates those greenbacks - and lots of them!
However, many internet startups have, and always will, provide time-limited free services in order to generate interest in the community...and some may even be able to sustain them by other means. You should always be able to find some enterprising company giving away a perfectly good quality service for free; but you need to expect to have to eventually either pay, or move on!
My (still extremely overvalued) 0.0042 euros.
- Emile
protonic.com : why not become a volunteer tech?
This site discontinues its free service and requires a subscription and login.
Inheritance is the sincerest form of nepotism.
/dev/null
Relationships that hurt are adversary. Individuals within adversary relationships fear each other. Relationships that ignore are neutral. Individuals within neutral relationships ignore each other. Relationships that help are synergic. Individuals within synergic relationships trust each other.
Trust is not a new word for humanity. It was coined long ago when the world was dominated by the adversary way. Trust meant that I could rely on you not to hurt me. It was safe to assume that you were not my enemy.
Synergic trust means means more. It means that while I can rely on you not to hurt me, I can further rely on you to help me. It is not only safe to assume that you are not my enemy, but I can count on you as a friend.
In a positive future, humans will choose to trust each other. We have decided to help begin the process of trusting. We have decided to trust you.
We have developed several products that appear to be valuable. We have considered many ways of marketing my products, and many pricing strategies. The value of these products would vary from individual to individual. For some there would be no financial value, for others there would be financial value worth thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars.
However, we have decided not to sell these products. Instead, we will release them as TrustWare. TrustWare is a unique concept which could become the primary exchange method in a positive future. When we trust ourselves to have created a valuable product. We can make it available to others without charge. We can trust that those who choose to use it will discover whatever value it has for them personally, and when they do they will choose to pay gratitude for the value received. This will produce a win-win relationship. This is a synergic transaction. In a positive future all parties to an exchange receive positive value.
We trust ourselves to have created a valuable service that will help you. We trust you to recognize that value and choose to help and support us. We believe that helping others leads to their helping us.
We believe in Co-Operation that is operating together so that we all win.
You help.
Others help.
You help others.
Others help you.
You help others help you.
Others help you help others.
You help others help you help others.
Others help you help others help you etc., etc., etc..
Synergic science offers us choices that can lead to a world that works for all humanity.
Synergy means working together, acting together as in Co-Action, creating together as in Co-Creation, laboring together as in Co-Laboration and operating together as in Co-Operation. The goal of synergic union is to accomplish a larger or more difficult task than can be accomplished by individuals working separately.
Friends, you are welcome to download files from a TrustWare archive without obligation. However to protect the integrity of these files, we do ask that you not alter their contents in any way nor remove the TrustMark label. There are no other conditions or restrictions. You are encouraged to copy the files freely and distribute them to whomever you choose.
If you believe you can improve our products, or you have identified a "bug" in one of our products. Please contact us. TrustWare is co-Created using "Open Co-Laboration" which is system of development modeled after the "Open Source" software development model. TrustWare co-Creators welcome any and all comments. If you would like to join the co-Creation and co-Development team, you are welcome to make application.
However, except in the role of a co-Creator, it is important that you do not change or modify TrustWare. Your changes may inadvertently damage the 'program' so that it does not function properly. Your changes which may seem like a good ones may be in conflict with facts unknown to you. So please don't change the product and don't remove the TrustMark label.
Synergy is when you and I both win. We trust that you will find value from our products and that when you do, you will choose to pay us gratitude. We further trust that if you receive value from the products we make available to you as TrustWare, you will wish us to produce more products.
Now if you get no value from our products then we expect nothing. Whether you get value or not is totally your own decision. We trust you.
When I say pay gratitude, I do not necessarily mean a financial payment. If you get only personal and emotional value from our products, then we ask only acknowledgement. If the value you get from our products is non-financial, we expect only non-financial gratitude, a simple thank you and perhaps a referral of others to our TrustWare products..
However, when you gain financially because of our products, then we expect a financial royalty.
To the best of my knowledge, this concept of distributing products on trust was originally discovered in the early 1960's by the Volitional Physicist, Andrew J.Galambos. The concept of {allowing the user to determine value} was a part of Galambos' Theory of Primary Property. Functionally, the concept has been used since the late 1970's to distribute some computer software products as Shareware, and more recently Netscape Navigator was available without charge for personal and education use. However, those using it commercially to make money were expected to pay licencing fees. Most recently, we have seen the phenomenon of "open source" software, but without a mechanism for payment when the product is financially valuable to the user. Perhaps the TrustWare concept can provide that mechanism.
If you discover that the files of The Time-binding Trust are of value to you, and you wish to support the Trust, you may choose to help us directly with your actions or if more convenient by making support payments. If your use of The Time-binding Trust provides you with continuing value, you are welcome to give the Trust continuing support. The amount, frequency, and timing of all gifts of support are entirely at the discretion of the giver. Payment can be arranged by contacting the co-Creators of TrustWare. A currently available mechanism would be PayPal or its clones.
Your gifts will be used to grow and improve our TrustWare so that we can better serve all of humanity.
The TrustMark removes all barriers to the dissemination of knowing. This essay is itself a TrustWare product and is released as TrustWare.
TrustMark 2001 by The Time-binding Trust
Future Positive
There were people on both sides of the money. Investors put it into businesses that weren't worth a damn but there were also people peddling those businesses, knowing full well they wouldn't make it.
Thank you for reading this comment.
Those of us who signed up a while ago can keep using their filtering (for now, I guess); others have to pay. Actually, they're kicking Earthlink users off the free service, because Earthlink has a paid subscription.
Brightmail works really well, but when I asked about the subscription service, it didn't seem appropriate for small sites. The subscription price is reasonable if spread across a few thousand users, but not for a few dozen; there were also pretty strong limitations on which platforms were supported.
Y'know, when things like that get a 5, it really brings into question the whole moderation scheme here....
--
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.
- Nietzsche
We often get used to having internet services for free, or for rather low prices, and somewhat justifiably so. In a technological- and internet-facilitated age, it costs almost nothing and is easier than ever to offer services and transfer information. Of course there is a one-time cost of setting up infrastructure and developing content, but once that is done, it costs next to nothing to distribute on a global stage. And this has been the case, what with search engines, e-mail, all manner of advanced software, and even information that would formerly have to be paid for are all offered on the internet for free. The internet has facilitated in the bringing of all manner of information to all ends of the earth, and done so at stunningly low costs.
Sad to say, but even spammers know this. Instead of paying thousands of dollars for traditional advertising, they just buy a cheap box that spews out spam to millions of e-mail addresses.
A free telephone directory service that has of late switched to a combination or free and fee services. I'm most upset about the reverse lookup. No longer can I enter random phone numbers just to see who owns them.
MY question is that why are MOST people completely reluctant to pay for any service on over the internet? They whine "I already bought a computer AND an internet service, why should I have to pay to access an archive of information, or to see something entertaining?" BUT, half these people have no problem paying for channels like HBO ABOVE AND BEYOND their normal cable bill, and even more of them have little problem ordering up something they like on Pay Per View. Why?
I worked at a commercial gaming site on the web until it recently closed down (due to a lack of funds). Now, we're left debating whether we should try again, this time with a subscription based service, to see if we can make this succeed. Let me show just two of our viewers' comments before AND after we announced this (these are actuall messages, just cut and pasted, so ignore the COMPLETE lack of grammar and spelling
Before:
"wow, thanx guys! i was looking for a place that had the entire MGS2 dvd trailer on a fast server. also thanx for that vid from final fantasy 8 of the final hour. worth the 250 megs. you guys are the best!"
"The mane reason I like your site was because I got to scope out games with out having to buy or rent them and this save me a ton of money to by more game and I can't find another site like yours even when do there quality suck"
AFTER:
"what the fuck is wrong with you guys?! no fucking way I'm paying for this! i'll find my shit elsewhere"
"fuck you fuck you fuuuuuck you
you want us to blow sunshine up you're ass or sumething? not going to happen you were the only nonwarez site ivisited now fuck you"
Let's just say the overall reaction was LESS than positive. Except for our core group of supporters (5% or so of all registered members), people are almost definately opposed to paying for content online. Why? We used to get bombarded with emails saying how great we were, and how we provided a service that NOBODY ELSE DOES, with a high amount of quality. Nobody likes paying for anything, and I understand it, but like it or not, you sometimes have to. Like I said, do people think we WANT to charge our viewers? NO! That's NOT why we got into this! I've watched every other person in this (small) company of 4 pour their time, sweat, and savings into this, and the LAST thing they wanted was to have to charge anyone for it.
It'll be an experiment when we re-launch the site (which I am not naming, not my place to spam slashdot) in the fall, and frankly, I don't know how things will turn out. Maybe it'll just be an excercise in futility, I don't know. What I DO know is that it takes large amounts of money to create, run, and maintain something large and unique, and that money HAS to come from somewhere. Our ISP bitched at us in our last month, because they wanted to charge us more due to the insane amount of traffic in our last two weeks (about 4TB or transfers each of the two weeks), and that's when the money finally ran out. People don't seem to understand that on the other end, money is NEEDED for things to run. Instead, they'll just bitch that they don't want to pay for it.
Personally, I'm surprised ANY company is still releasing Linux, BSD, or any open source OS for free. I respect that, and wish them the best of luck.
Free email isn't going anywhere soon. Even if they made no banner revenue at all, they would still give away email. Why do you think so many sites give away email? It's the one sure way to get people to come back to your site. If you want for people to revisit your site, you offer some kind of useful free service. Since email is generally considered the most useful service on the internet it's a given.
Once you've got their eyeballs, you can sell them stuff.
But Yogi, the RIAA won't like that.
it's on the main page ;P
linux might be able to make money via support contracts offered by big OEMS like compaq or dell but if all theri money lies in YOU not being able to figure something out doesn't that seem like it's an incentive for linux to stay hard to use ? and therefore off the desktop and out of the mainstream ? the average user just wants something that works, i was faced with this myself yesterday when i got tired of fucking with slackware's shitty support for anything on my laptop and after hours of trying to get pcmcia/sound working i gave up and instaleld win 2k pro on it which automatically detected/installed/setup all my hardware while i had my back turned.. i've been running linux in some form since '95 and there comes a point where the time and effort wasted on smoething out weighs the benefit of using it if the linux business model is to offer support for their already difficult to setup use and maintain system what incentive is there for them to make it better ? none ; in face they have an incentive to make it more difficult since more people would pay for support that way if every good site on the internet becomes a pay site the internet will die because no one weants to pay (and i use cable but this is an example) $40 a month for a phone line plus $20 a month for dialup access AND THEN have to pay another $3.50 or $5 or whatever for EVERY SITE THEY USE people pay for the access so they expect the services to be free and i believe they are right in thinking so
linux might be able to make money via support contracts offered by big OEMS like compaq or dell but if all theri money lies in YOU not being able to figure something out doesn't that seem like it's an incentive for linux to stay hard to use ? and therefore off the desktop and out of the mainstream ? the average user just wants something that works, i was faced with this myself yesterday when i got tired of fucking with slackware's shitty support for anything on my laptop and after hours of trying to get pcmcia/sound working i gave up and instaleld win 2k pro on it which automatically detected/installed/setup all my hardware while i had my back turned.. i've been running linux in some form since '95 and there comes a point where the time and effort wasted on smoething out weighs the benefit of using it if the linux business model is to offer support for their already difficult to setup use and maintain system what incentive is there for them to make it better ? none ; in face they have an incentive to make it more difficult since more people would pay for support that way if every good site on the internet becomes a pay site the internet will die because no one weants to pay (and i use cable but this is an example) $40 a month for a phone line plus $20 a month for dialup access AND THEN have to pay another $3.50 or $5 or whatever for EVERY SITE THEY USE people pay for the access so they expect the services to be free and i believe they are right in thinking so (i just read an example of pay per view being used but that is completely invalid when brought to the internet as cable companies already have a monopoly on the content they provide, pay per view movies have a niche as they are about teh laziness of getting off your ass to drive to blockbuster vs calling an 800 #, besides teh majority of these are either a.) porno which you dont' want ot be seen buying .. porn is available on the net.. but is it of high quality as vhs or dvd porno ? hell no it isn't or b.) live events for which you would otherwise have to pay for a ticket and go out of your way to see) just think about what would happen if every site you visited started charging for access and the added inconvenience of a plethora of logins and passwords every time you wanted to do anything like .. read a slashdot story or search for something on freshmeat -- the net would die over night and there would be nothing left but virtual tumbleweeds
Like Tom Vu said once in an infomercial: If you don't even have the time to come to my seminar, then you DESERVE to be broke!
Yeah that's right all you leechers. You wanted everything for free right? And then you wanted to block out ads and cookies right? You even want to leech free mp3's and not pay for them. Ok, now thanks to you people the internet is dying. Online advertising is fast becoming extinct, thanks to all you stingy bastards.
So now, to survive, web companies have to start chargine money. Gone are the days of cool innovation on the net, gone are all the cool freebies. You DESERVED it. Yes you do. The very internet that you love so much is now going after you wallet.
So, was all the ad ignoring worth it for you? Wait another 6 months hahaha!!!
---------
Did you just fart? Or do you always smell like that?
eTrade SUCKS
hiring brand name MBAs for ridiculous salaries (web-based email/chat isn't exactly some deep esoteric endeavor).
hiring perl jocks for $100+ per hour ( xyz.com, your local free isp, the works)
buying up beacoup unneeded office space at king's ransom rates for a hypothetical future workforce of thousands (yahoo)
floating unmanagable corporate bonds or otherwise staking your future on unreasonable margin wet-dreams (amazon.com + many others)
generally over-expanding in an effort to take over the world...
so I guess my point is that if you are planning on taking over the planet or fulfilling some 'grand-synthesis' of commercial services, then NO, advertising will not be able to pay your bills.
But there ought to be a place for the small/medium company that just wants to sell a few books online(hey I expect to pay for the books), or provide a free chat service, news site, email hosting, etc. I mean the hardware is cheap, bandwidth is cheap, 20 bucks a year or a few banner ads per person ought to be able to get you there with extra cash in your pocket.
Hopefully, many of these Nasdaq monoliths will just go belly-up, and their high-priced business practices with them.
Then we can get some company based in Kansas or someplace where a freshly-minted college student can rent an apartment for $600/month or less, and go work for a pretty decent small-potatoes company. No expansion into selling toasters with that email client. Or home mortgage loans. Just provide a cool service to 10 million people for only $1/year...
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
For as long as people are willing to pay for them
Choose your allies carefully, it is highly unlikely you will be held accountable for the actions of your enemies
That would simply make me hate the product.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
After all of the services are pay, we'll have an organization arise that demands that the services be allowed to roam the web unfettered by man, free of any destructive corporate influence...
Free the services!
------ 1001001
With banner ad revenues completely gone it's likely that we will see more and more pay services.
SDF has been free since 1989. That's the longest running free service that I know of.
So if people really wanted to pay for good software, why do they run
RedHat Linux? Personally, if I like something, I'm willing to pay for
it. Or are there Linux users out there who actually pay for their
software? From what I've heard, Unix is all about freeware,
downloadable from the Internet.
Everyone is telling me that freeware software isn't to be trusted,
since it may include all kinds of nasty viruses or tracking
devices. But then, other people are telling me that RedHat Linux is
used to run web servers, mail servers and other business critical
stuff. So why is this RedHat freeware trusted?
-- Harold
After reading a lot about RedHat and Linux, yesterday I decided that I
wanted to try it out. But I live in a small town and our only computer
shop sells only Microsoft Windows and a few games. In order to find
out where I could buy RedHat Linux, I talked to some of the "hacker"
type of guys at my job, who knew more about it. I was infuriated when
I found out that it was possible to download and even install RedHat
Linux from the Internet for free, through illegal so called "FTP
mirror" servers! They even told me that this was the "normal" way of
installing RedHat Linux. Even though it is illegal to download
software from the Internet like this!
Personally, I think this kind of behavior is abhorrent! You people
just don't understand that theft is theft, even though you are only
stealing "bits of information". The people behind Linux deserves to be
paid for their hard work! How would you feel if somebody stole your
computer? That wouldn't be too fun, would it?
Why do you think Bill Gates of Microsoft (the creator of MS-DOS and
Windows) has become a wealthy man, when Linus Torvalds of RedHat (the
creator of Linux) hasn't? That's because people have been paying Mr
Gates for his software, while other people are illegally downloading
Mr Torvalds' RedHat Linux for free!
From what I've heard, there are even web sites that specializes in
providing stolen Linux software (i.e., programs that can be run under
the Linux operating system). At those sites, you can choose what
kind of software you want to download (games, word processors, etc.),
and you are provided with lists of stolen software that you can
download, for free!
Even though there must be millions of dollars lost because of this
murky business, this hasn't been brought into the general public's
attention. My guess is that this is due to the fact that everyone has
been talking about the Napter MP3 web site. But I hope that this "free
software" business will be the next in line to be shut down!
-- Harold
The kind folks at The Web Union used to provide free shells, and gratis ad-free web space for non-profit pages. As the link shows, they have discontinued this and plan "re-emerge at some point in the near future as a low-cost hosting provider".
Not to mention ordinary (voice) directory assistance, for which phone operators are starting to charge more and more.
A disturbing trend...
In Switzerland, for instance, unlimited local directory assistance used to be part of the basic phone subscription, and you could get it from any pay phone for the price of a local call. (Or even for free, I don't remember. Plus every booth had all the phone books in it.) Nowadays they charge outrageous prices - roughly $1 from home and $1.50 from a pay phone, per inquiry. Last I checked they also charged for using the online white pages, but on the bright side, this seems to have changed.
France still has free directory assistance through minitel, but IIRC, you gotta pay dearly if you also want an old-fashioned phone book.
Live near NYC, need a copy of the Manhattan Yellow pages? Bell Atlantic wants something like $50 for them. Better ask a friend to save last year's edition...
SOftware is more like knowledge, it is not manufactured
you dont pay for the car, but for the raw material, transformation, labour and profit
if the raw material was free
material tranformation(melting, forging etc.) was free
if someone is offering free labour
and some non-profit car company want your car can be free
The initial cost of development in closed source model is high, the price they charge is proportionate to the size of the company and the money it has(Microsoft is a case)not the benefits the user gets
open source development is not costly, its more like community development work, You dont reinvent the wheel, existing tools and service are optimally utilised, Sharing Your knowledge and software has become cheaper and widely available due to internet
You dont lose anything as in theft with open source, but you gain good will, you save manhours, you help your community
http://senthilnayagam.com/
If "free space," "free email," and "free remotely-hosted cgi" disappear due to the collapse of banner advertising, who is going to be hurt?
Face it if you have to pay for something, you have to be serious about it. I am. I rented 500mb of web space for $99 a year and am moving a Crosswinds site out of pop-up land. I pay for my ISP because I know paying customers get better treatment. My cheapskate mother whom I love dearly has two free ISP's and has discovered she can't get on what is a very robust backbone in Westchester County in the evenings because there are too many users for the space.
We enthusiasts will pay, build, and shop around to keep what we have. It's people like my mother whom the loss of free services will hurt. It's also the fifteen year old kid who does not have a credit card or checking account but who wants a web page. She can't rent space. Yes there are money orders but the best deals on space rent yearly. It will hurt the SAHM who wants to put up a page about her husband, kids, and pets as well as a memorial to her own mother. Her voice is as legitimate as ours but she needs free space. And what of the grandmother or the woman suffering from some chronic disease.
These are not the people to whom the media gives an authentic voice. The free internet has been the place they have been heard. The free internet has given these people a voice and with its loss, their voices will be lost too.
Yes, and if the ads get bad enough, the provider can always charge a small fee to get rid of them. This fee ranges enormously, and I have paid it at times. I paid $96 to server.com to get ads pulled off a board for one year. This was a gouge but I did not know it at the time.
A more reasonable fee is $12/year at Crosswinds, $5/year at Geocities, $5/year Alxbook etc.... There are ads on ZOID's ballot (Flashbase You can't get one because they are not taking on new customers) because Flashbase charges $300/year to get rid of them.
At what point are the ads bad enough that folks will pay to get rid of them? When does cheap become better than free?
This is a bit like the joke about the man confronting the "lady" in the street and asking her if she'll sleep with him for $100, and then $50, and then $5 etc.... She finally says "What kind of a girl do you think I am?" The man answers: "We've alreaady established that. Now we're just discussing the price."
Lemme throw a clue out to htwright...Linux is SUPPOSED to be free. The designers specifically made it that way. It's impossible to buy Linux for the same reason why it's impossible to buy a free newspaper. The people who made Linux are giving it away for free. It's not that hard, geddit?
How much do you people want to bet that htwright is a West Palm Beach voter?
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If a service was meant to be free (like links.am, yahoo.com, weblist.ru or whatever) then your use of it doesn't make you a leecher. But blocking banner ads and cookies, leeching MP3s to avoid buying the danged CD, ad nauseam, that sort of thing hurts the e-conomy.
::getting off soapbox::
I believe the free-stuff site is going to die. People have become immune to ads. Think about your favourite free-stuff area. Would you pay a modest fee--like a one-shot $10 fee or whatever--to get that same content with NO ADS? I don't know about you, but I would. I'd pay $10 to get Netscape SmartDownload with no ads. I'd pay $10 to get my mail with no ads.
There are lots of examples of this. Take Eudora, which I'm sure a lot of you use. You can get Eudora Sponsored (free, but with ads) or you can pay for your copy (same content, no ads). Take Juno--get that ISP free with an ad banner, or $20/month with no banner.
The "leechers", as I define them, are people who don't/won't understand that SOMEONE HAS TO PAY FOR WHAT YOU USE. If you don't pay, who does? That's right--the advertisers. It's leechers that are killing paid-to-browse companies like AllAdvantage or ClickDough. It's leechers that block banners and popups which lead advertisers to ask, "since your users are using WebWasher, Guidescope, or whatever to block our ads, why should we pay you to have them up?"
The free-stuff site can survive -IF- the people who use them co-operate with the advertisers. Click those banners! Fill out forms! Above all, buy from the advertisers if you see something you like! My Palm VII, my wristwatch, my software, and even the computer I'm typing on right now were all purchased on the internet through banner ads. You don't like ads? Contact the free-stuff area and indicate your willingness to pay for the content.
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