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?
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.
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.
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.
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
You have to pay anyway. It's just that time == money. You choose your currency.
----------------------------------------------
the pun is mightier than the sword
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.
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 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.
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...)
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)
>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!
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 --
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 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.
SDF has been free since 1989. That's the longest running free service that I know of.
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