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The Not-So-Free Web
Big Brass Balls writes: "The NY Times has an article about how freebies are becoming harder to come by on the web." Registration free link, even -- "just doing my bit to promote freebies on the web." And I never got my free 50 photos developed by Shutterfly, either.
http://channel.nytimes.com/2001/05/01/technology/0 1FREE.html?ex=989985600&en=9b8497cdaccdf05e&ei=500 1&partner=YAHOO
Use the Channel Luke, the Channel!
With charging I think we will see much more real content on the internet and just not "hi, my name is John...bla bla bla" homepages.
Speaking as someone who happens to have a "hi, my name is Brent...bla bla bla" website, I can vouch for the fact that we'll be here forever. As long as I can get a hosting account for less than the cost of a good steak dinner (or even a bad steak dinner), I'll be showing my webcam until they pry it from my cold, offline fingers.
And your suggestion doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, either. For example, I can pay fifty cents to get a copy of my local Houston Chronicle paper, or I can get a free copy of the independent Houston Press. Guess which one has better quality? It's a flip - for restaurant reviews, hard-hitting political articles, and what's going on locally, you want the free one. For up-to-the-minute sports scores, good cooking recipes, and national entertainment news, I turn to the - well, I turn to the web, actually, but that's beside the point.
The bottom line is that charging subscribers more doesn't guarantee a higher quality. Take Slashdot - can you imagine a better source for this kind of thing? What good would it do to charge for it - most of the good stuff would disappear. I like reading the opinions of the AC's, and they sure wouldn't pay for the privilege of posting.
What's your damage, Heather?
I think this article unfairly points the finger at Yahoo!. You can still get a certain amount of mail service for free (something like 5 Megs storage). So, yes, some of the idiot dot-coms with "we will give you free things for branding purposes and then plan to screw you over when you depend on us, but oops, we ran out of money" as their motto have died. But I think Yahoo's committment to free stuff is alive and well. For the time being anyway.
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The web is free! Is slashdot not free? Is hotmail/yahoo not free? Is google not free? Oh wait, we want physical stuff? puhlez! Is cnn.com not free? once I got cnn.com I cancelled my cable. Talk about free stuff, that is free $15 a month in my wallet. The web is mostly free for most things that I am after, information! I mean, what do we want? free breakfast? Shit, without the net, I got free samples via junk mail, I discard any free sample I get, likewise all those free web thingy pissed me off, and I am glad that they are gone. Cuz guess who gets them, little kids and adults who don't know better, giving out their entire information to whoever for free stuff? What is up with people and free stuff? My friend said if McD gave free fries for a sample of DNA, that many people will line up, I am beginning to believe that is true.
------ Curiosity killed the cat. {satisfaction brought it back | it didn't die ignorant | lack of it is killing mankind
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+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Only now the VCs have stopped picking up the tab.
Lets be realistic about whats free on the Internet. Everything has a price as we all know, so why are many things harder to find then they normally were? The answers are simple.
.03 cent click throughs? its unfeasible. For those who have done IT budgets here we all know how much a mid sized cage can cost in a colo. Its a miracle many survived as long as they did.
Before the tech sector stocks took major dives, we had drones of companies offering everything short of their mothers for free. An influx of companies who never had a definitive game plan for their businesses who thought that by offering X service for free, they'd be the ones and only to capture that segment of the market.
Venture Capital firms went bonkers thinking that by these companies getting users they'd eventually end up having that company convert revenue by turning around, after a set quota of users were met, and offering something for pay.
Well people didn't want to pay and the companies should have clearly seen that from the beginning. If someone is signing up for a free service, what makes you think they'd want to pay for something they can move to the next competitor and get for free?
Aside from that, many people bitch about the freebie services they already have and turn around and abuse it entirely. eg. All those spammers who open up a new Hotmail account daily. So its no surprise the number of companies have declined. How do you expect them to pay bandwidth, colo, equipment fees, with
Hardcore crypto
Want Root?
Yep, I wanted to see what the print quality was, so I got two prints done by Shutterfly. They sent the two, and then erased the rest of my "free" prints.
Nowhere on the site could I find any language that suggested something like "up to 25 free prints in your first order." They also charged for the postage materials and service, so I know it wasn't an attempt to save themselves from 25 separate envelopes.
A newspaper in San Francisco last week (forget which one) had a front page teaser discussing the liberties taken with calling card rates. Sure, 100 free minutes for $2, but each time you dial it's a minimum of 25 minutes.
The more granularity they can force, the fewer transactions they really have to process. It's all a scam.
[
As more and more of the "prime-time" sites float subscription fees, this will divert more and more traffic to the free sites, which will crunch them even more through increased bandwidth costs. I know I won't be paying to read Salon or Yahoo or anything else; I'll keep surfing for the (dwindling) free sites and keep driving their costs up. And since I run a couple myself, seeing my own costs go up as more people give up on the pay sites.
Lovers of free information might wind up inadvertantly killing a lot of it off just by trying to access it. This is a real problem.
TomatoMan
-- http://frobnosticate.com
You can bypass all the registration nags by editing your hosts file (/etc/hosts in UNIX, %WINDOWSDIRECTORY%\hosts in Windows). Add the following lines:
208.48.26.223 nytimes.com
208.48.26.223 www.nytimes.com
That's the IP address of channel.nytimes.com (the story server), which, coincidentally, is mirrored across the other nytimes.com servers (even the images they use, although in the stories, they use another server to host them), except for the main www.nytimes.com server. Plus, you can get directory listings. Can anyone say recursive wget?
that such business techniques were unprofitable, and would eventually crumble?
It's about the fact that the entire cultures of the Web and also of USENET are changing. Content providers aren't just not offering freebies, which as you point out is economically understandable; they are also putting in absurd "copy protection" mechanisms, digital watermarking, etc.
As an example, the number of sites I run across with stupid and ineffectual but nonetheless annoying "anti-copy scripts" is increasing exponentially. Usually they try to disable right-clicking to get a context menu, by throwing up an inane message about not being allowed to copy content. Naturally, the scripts can be disabled by any competent person, or can be bypassed by simply right-clicking and pressing return to get rid of the box and right-clicking again fast enough. But they represent an altogether alarming shift in attitude. No longer are people sharing information, data, resources--they're "displaying" those resources, but not allowing them to be "used" and reused.
The most obvious examples are images and multimedia. If I go to a website, sometimes I see a nice background pattern or image I'd like to save to use on my desktop. But, oh, wait, someone has disabled right-clicking. Bah. I can get around it easily, but most average net surfers will not be able to. Ditto for images--for example, my father was on a website with tractor images, and for some godforsaken reason he actually collects antique tractors; he saw pictures of the same model tractor he has, but in a beautiful already-restored condition, and wanted to save them. Bang, disabled. What would it possibly hurt him to have those images available locally? And of course RealMedia and the Microsoft asf/wmf formats exist mainly for the purpose of streaming video or audio without the user being able to save the clips.
I don't know about you, but I don't like what that represents. The sad part is that even podunk personal sites are getting into the act and restricting content from being copied to a local disk. This is just not in the spirit of sharing and goodwill and community; it's extending meatspace limits on property into the digital realm where those limits are entirely artificial and do not belong. If you release something into the digital webbified world, you should expect people to want to copy it, and you should welcome that as the result of a cyberworld where copying items has virtually no cost. Otherwise, release it somewhere else, not on the net.
To make matters worse, this is a very short-sighted attitude. Web sites disappear all the time, and if no one can copy their content locally, that content will disappear along with the website if the content was copy-protected and view-only.
Plus, the whole attitude behind that is just selfish and contrary to the principles the Web and USENET were founded on. Just think of the recent story about gaming sites closing right and left--this didn't involve copy-protection, but it does involve that attitude of not being part of the community so much as being a business first last and always. Many excellent gaming sites had worthwhile, even unique content, and were forced to close. Yet I can't recall a single one making their resources available to the rest of the community, say by giving a free licence to host any of the dead site's resources on other more successful gaming sites, temporarily at least. Funny, I thought gaming was such a community thing, and that gaming sites are an outgrowth of that community. Yet no one seems to share like a community; if a site dies, usually all its unique content dies with it, never to be seen again.
Another issue is the artificial restrictions and dangers created by digital watermarking. Today watermarking is used almost exclusively on images, but the applications for the future are unlimited. Today, it is most commonly membership sites that insert personally identifiable UserID and date and IP information into images, so that if those images turn up elsewhere, someone particular can be blamed and kicked out. But with the technologies companies like Microsoft are pushing, even non-membership sites could watermark content and persecute people for noncommercial copying of it. Watermarks will turn up in audio and video streams, background images, every kind of data. And when that happens, there will be no community on the Net; resources will never again be shared; the rules of meatspace will effectively have been artificially grafted onto cyberspace.
Even today watermarking causes problems. For a very long time USENET has been a place where people noncommercially share not just chat and other text, but any sort of data and information they are mutually interested in. There's a group my dad can post to about tractors, and even post pictures of his tractors or get images or video involving tractors. You can find groups which post high-res scans of photographic art. You can find groups for freeware and groups for pirated applications, groups for start-up sounds and groups for full mp3s, groups for pr0n and groups for bird photography. The spirit of USENET was always the spirit of noncommercial sharing of digital content, both original and borrowed from the Web and scanned from meatspace.
But, companies from the Web feel free to spam USENET with ads for commercial websites, causing my service provider costs to skyrocket, and then complain when their content is posted for free to USENET. They shouldn't spam USENET users if they don't want their stuff to be posted onto USENET. I think it's rightfully open season on content providers who spam us without our consent; we damn well should reproduce their content without their consent. Tit-for-tat.
Yet, a few days ago I was scanning through some groups and ran across a poster who was not only told by a commercial website to stop posting their images, but this commercial website posted the man's name, address, and telephone number to USENET based on matching the digital watermark in the images to a UserID and billing information in their database. He repeated the message several times. I could not believe it. They published his personal info for all to see, for posting a few images he got from them after they spammed USENET with ads. That is a violation of the highest order. And this is the sort of attitude some arrogant content providers are getting. We're not in for a rosy future.
That's all I really have to say about that, except to say that the site that published this man's personal info was http://www.photostudio17.com and I hope there's a script kiddie or haxor out there with his name on them. The USENET article in question is--aw hell, my crappy news server expired the original articles, but some message-IDs that are related are MPG.1558a2f6e185166a989de4@news.cncdsl.com kaTH6.49361$U4.11780044@news1.rdc1.tn.home.com MPG.1559893ed8cd22a6989de5@news.cncdsl.com and many others you'll find in the stated group, to corroborate the story.
In addition, does anyone have information on how to remove various types of digital watermarks? I can post the images in question somewhere, if you can't find them in the group but would like to look into the particular watermarking these abusive privacy-breakers used; but perhaps the images in the preview section of their site have similar watermarking.
I'm not really interested in these clothed pictures of late teens and twentysomethings; I'm just interested in getting back at someone who's violated internet privacy in a very real and annoying way. Comments, suggestions?
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
... just the other day i saw a page with loads of links saying things like "click here for free naked teenage pictures"
I haven't gotten anything free off the web in a while. The last time I got something was about 4 or 5 years ago when I got a mug from a RAID company (I didn't know what a RAID was at the time - I just thought the mug was cool). Anyway - about a week later I started getting phone calls (I wasn't smart enough to not put my real phone number on the request form - I figured if I put a fake number, I wouldn't get the mug) from the company asking if I liked the mug my employees ordered for me (I had a growing staff of 20) and if I had a chance to look over their catalogue. I had said we already owned a couple of their products and we were using them in our NT servers. By the 3rd call I was quite annoyed so I asked the guy to hold on a second, put down the phone and started yelling at my 'co-workers' what did they mean the RAID controller just went down? When I picked up the phone again, the guy wasn't there and he never called back again :)
Like sex? Read and write about it! Indecent Blogging
Check out my free SI swimsuit calendar that I signed up for on a website and you'll know why it is free. Can't believe they jacked up the number of days in April...
The article points out how freebies are disappearing... and then started to list incredible give-aways that are no more.
Now, I am not trying to seem a little cross here but how long can someone give away real products like keyboards and such as a business model? It was a good thing while the companies didn't have a clue (/me pets my pretty keyboard) but it is obvious that it would fail.
Then again, there are still a few free things on the web: I regularly use Net2Phone... it gives me free long distance from computer to phone.. sure, they cut it down to 5 minutes now but I doubt they could have lasted while giving infnite amount of time (5 mins per call, inf call now).
This is like the dot.com crunch. Those businesses that are giving away huge items for "looking at a few webs" have an unsafe business model anyway -- we should not expect them to continue after they GetAClue(tm). Some businesses stop offering free services -- of course.. all businesses? I don't think we have reached that level yet.
But the real kicker is when you go to log in mp3.com insists you've forgotten your password. And when you go to have your password mp3.com says "There was a problem verifying your account. Please try again in a few minutes." So, either sign the new agreement or get your music yanked, but you can't sign the new agreement because their login mechanism is broken, so it's your own fault when your music placed there for free (but mp3.com's been making money off of both advertising and CD sales) disappears in 48 hours.
I imagine artists who've signed up to pay mp3.com $20 a month aren't facing this. But at least mp3.com could be honest about its tactics. Or have their ept staff left, and the systems are really failing?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
"We had five 500-pound fat guys showing up at the smorgasbord and stuffing themselves all day," Mark R. Goldston, the chief executive of NetZero. He said 12 percent of NetZero's users accounted for 53 percent of its network costs. Cutting back their use, or getting them to find another service provider altogether, will save the company $20 million to $40 million a year.
Of course, I have not seen many people say much about this. This is the problem behind the thing all along. You get users who know how to abuse the system. It is like a water well where everyone can use the water. it is fine until sompeople start to hog as much as they can.
The traditional location of the Garden Of Eden is souteastern Iraq. Archeology bears this out, at least to the degree that it used to be a fertile and lush area. Don't look now, but it has been a desert for a long time. The natural result of typical human behavior is the creation of a desert.
Now imagine this as applied to the Internet.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Yeah.. I'm still waiting for my cash from GET CASH NOW!, a free holiday from Disney and Microsoft, and that new kidney for the kid in Florida.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
The following section from the NYT article cited has been refuted by Salon. They've said they have no such plans & that David Talbot was completely misquoted.
"A lot of our audience pays $300 a year to join National Public Radio and they don't have to pay anything," he said. As early as next year, Mr. Talbot said, Salon hopes to impose a fee of $75 to $150 a year to read any of its site with ads. Why not just impose the full fee now? "That's jumping off a cliff with no net," Mr. Talbot said. Sites that have imposed fees, like Yahoo Auctions, have experienced declines in volume of as much as 90 percent. And the biggest subscription content site, The Wall Street Journal Online, has 574,000 subscribers at $29 to $59 a year, one-tenth the monthly audience of the largest free financial news sites.
Guess the NYT just ain't what she used to be.
The only tool you've got against psychosis is experience.
From salon.com
"Others have written to us wondering whether today's Premium is simply a nose-in-the-tent kind of deal, preparing the way for an entirely subscribers-only site in the future. (An erroneous media report misquoting our founder, David Talbot, outlining such a plan helped fan such suspicions.) That's not our plan."
The rest of the article can be found here: http://www.salon.com/letters/editor/2001/05/02/pre mium_progress/index.html
What? You're providing a service on the internet with the full knowledge that you're not going to make money? I suppose you're doing this because you like it? :-)
It's sites like yours that are what makes the internet worthwhile for me. You have some knowledge that you are willing to share with the rest of the world, and you are happy to do it without needing to make a buck. True, you've got some ads to try and defray some of your costs, but you're not trying to make a living off of them.
It's the big companies who are going in and really trying to make money with poor business models that will always fail. The only ones that seem to be surviving are the ones who got in early with something innovative that actually works, or brick-and-mortar companies who are using the internet as an extension of themselves - kind of like an online catalog store.
It's damn hard to break even doing freebies. My site CoasterCount.com offers a free service to roller coaster enthusiasts. The web hosting runs me about $30 a month, and I *just* barely make that back in advertising. Any service that has actual overhead and material costs is NOT going to break even, because generally it is now possible to make about .2c per add view. If your expenses thus exceed about 1 penny per customer visit, you can toss your dreams of any providing it at cost out the window.
TODO: Something witty here...
I remember when I could order online and get free shipping, so I ordered from one site.... then I'd get a freebie from another site, so then I'd order from there.... then the cycle would go on.
But the thing is, not a single one of these stores offered anything compelling for me to actually go and order from them again. After all, isn't online shopping a "commodity service"? (or at least it has evolved into that)
===> An eye for an eye makes everyone blind - MG
Right now, there is tons of advertising and no privacy, but the sites are free.
With subscription service, we will have at least as much advertising, less privacy, and it's no longer free.
The quality of the content and services will have to improve before more than a very small percentage people are willing to pay.
I liked the suggestion of paying users getting ad-free content, but it is only a matter of time before companies "supplement" the subscription revenue with advertising.
RC
RC
So "free" service means that only the biggest will survive, that they'll eventually become bigger, bloated, and more inefficient (as large companies with little competition tend to do *cough*Redmond*cough*), and that sooner or later they'll face either competitive or legal demise. Thus the cycle completes and begins anew. Everyone say "oohhhmmmm".
"Anonymous Coward" is for whistleblowers, not unpopular opinions.