Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
Newswire: May 2, 2001: Yahoo! (YHOO) stock quintupled today on news that the New York Times had just signed a $2.3 trillion dollar contract with Yahoo! to publish its stories on Yahoo's site.
One anonymous NYTimes source was quoted as saying: "We just put this story up on how the 'free' model wasn't working, and our web servers crashed under the load of all the people coming from Yahoo's site. Boy, were we wrong!
Our sysadmin keeps screaming something about slashing dots affecting us, and how we're a bunch of clueless idiots, but our marketing department tells us they're positive the users are clicking on our article because they saw it on Yahoo, and besides, they throw much better parties."
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+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
... just the other day i saw a page with loads of links saying things like "click here for free naked teenage pictures"
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...
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.
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...