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Canada Post Kills Free Internet-For-Life Program
An Anonymous Coward writes: "About a year ago Canada Post was selling CD's for $10 in post offices promising free internet for life. The software was netzero style, with banner ads. Apperently all Canadians have died, they cancelled the free service and switched to a pay-per-month plan. Here's a Winnipeg Free Press article all about it."
I always wondered about those "Internet for life" companies:
Did they mean the life of the subscriber or company?
---Lane
---Lane
What's the point of moderating?!
2) They don't want to get sued so the probably want to keep up their part of that lifetime-deal
-> Better start looking over your shoulder. A lot! :-)
karma capped
I give the Trolls on Slashdot a life-expectancy of 5 *seconds* to begin posting Canada people death jokes. :)
Advertisiment is different from TOS.
It's the same as waking up with an ugly lady next to you opposed as Cindy Crawford after drinking beer.
Buy a Nintendo DS Lite
Ok, really... who would sign up for internet service from the POST OFFICE!.... "ya - your e-mail should/maybe/possibly arrive in 3-5 business days, but maybe longer... " no thanks!
I have to agree, selling something as 'free internet for life' and then welching on it is false advertising, and as much as I know it'll come out of my pocket.. the parties involved should share the blame and be punished, to set an example.
False advertising? Yes.
Will it be judged as such in court? Nah. Lifetime services are expected by insurance companies, but that's about it. No court in the nation is going to force a company to give free internet for life. It's absurd. This isn't news.
Got Rhinos?
Well, apart from the fact that this should come as no surprise (someone else who though they could get something for nothing)... what the hell was Canada Post doing distributing these CDs?
Canada Post sure knows how to waste my money when it comes to the internet. They spent who knows how many millions developing and promoting a service allowing me to pay my bills online. Too bad every major Canadian bank already provides this service!
Here's an idea for Canada Post - stick to delivering the mail and stop wasting my money.
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
Before us Canucks get a piece of that Broadband-for-All goodness that we've been hearing about lately :)
___
Cogito cogito, ergo cogito sum.
We've seen this before. Ad based internet hosting just doesn't work. Reccently several news agencies on the web have even posted that banner ads are not as high impact as people think they are. (well of course not, especially when pages have 4 or 5! at least they aren't pop-up ads!)
It's a nice idea, but unfortunately it doesn't work. If people really want 'free' internet for life, I reccomend that they look around for community freenets like Seattle Community Network, Arbornet, Tallahassee Freenet, Alachua County Freenet just to name a few. Go and support these by donating 20.00 a year or something like that and get free dial-up internet access. It's a great way for people to get on the internet, and compared to most local isp's or national isp's, it's only one or two months cost.
Don't turn your back on the community networks that are still in place that gave us PPP access to the internet, and before that Terminal based access!
But ad based free internet just isn't a viable option, KMART, FREEI.net, and so many others have failed. Juno and NetZero are now one company, and if there not careful, it won't be long until they are gone. Juno was really cool when people just wanted email, but now people want internet access to from them. Those dialup lines and backbones cost money, per call, per month, and per meg. And in the end, the CPM and click throughs on those banner ads just don't pay, and people find work arounds so they don't have to deal with them.
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
Damnit, Jim, I'm an anarchist, not a F@#$!^& doctor!
Why did most Canadians not use it? Well, (And this is a blatant opinion) in Canada, the internet is quite rampantly dirt cheap. You can walk down and pick up a Sympatico tm package and get a couple hours a month for about 15 bucks or so. Now that is substantially more than free, but the second thing is that the Government has regulated (or so I'm told) the high-speed internet sector and it costs less than 50 bucks a month for high speed. And when certain companies coughcoughSHAWcoughcough conveniently forget to charge for a couple months as they did to me, it's not that expensive. Plus, there's no ads.
And if you really want free dial-up (read, if you even want dial-up and have a choice) you can find free ISP's all over. The idea of a free ISP with ads just doesn't fly because for the most part there are much more reasonable ideas out there that aren't offered by Canada post
And why Canada Post? Let's just see. It takes a week to get a 1kg package from New Zealand Regina Saskatchewan. It also takes a week to get a letter from a place 5 hours away from Regina to Regina. This make sense? Not to me, but hey, they bring me my mail, so I can't complain since all it is is bills and junk mail from (blatant opinion) my idiot MP.
- Relativistic? That's barely Newtonian!
As someone who's about to re-launch their site with a portion of it to be subscription based, I have to chuckle. Not for the poor Canadians that got hosed here, but for one of my readers that was pointing out how these things work and how us moving to a subscription base was not needed. Eventually, everyone pays somehow.... now if they could all be paying me!
Not so fast now, was it "free" internet as in "free beer" or as in "free speech" ? maybe the new pay-per-month deal comes with the source code for the banner ad software on the CD ...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
3Web/Cybersurf has been offering free dial-up in Alberta at least for a number of years. The service has been ok from all reports (I'm not a subscriber) and I haven't seen anything saying that there will be a mandatory charge coming. From their webpage it appeared that for $10 a month you could get slightly higher priority and no adds, or you could just stick with the lesser priority and not be charged at all for it. I think that they have done a good job up to this point and hopefully the mandatory payment is not true, although they still will be a cheap place to get dial-up for everyone in the boonies. 8)
Many of these ads were in fact television ads... Please don't tell me advertising can't work on the internet: these ads were the same than on tv and they were there all the time, not 2 minutes every 10-15 minutes. These ads were also targeted. These ads were even using the user's name in them.
Ok. This was really really annoying: my sound was turned off. But if this type of ads can't work, nothing would work on the internet.
...this would be a great reason to sue the company to fucking smithereens, but unfortunately it has probably already folded so one couldn't collect anything.
Oh well... one can always visit the homes of its boardmembers with a cigar-cutter, mafia-style, and make yourself a nice necklace of fingers... just a thought, don't blame me if someone really DOES it... =P
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
e.g., Quantum Link, an on-line service for commodore computer users, offered a "lifetime membership" for $150.00 which promised $0/month with 5 hours usage. You still pay if you go over 5 hours, but stay under and it's free for life. When Quantum Computer Services became AOL, the new company still had to honor old contracts. You cannot bail out of contracts just by changing names. So I still have my 5 free hours with no monthly fee but on AOL now. When AOL went to flat-rate pricing, they switched everyone over. Everyone wants $19.95 flat rate, right? Not me. Luckily I saved the letters from Q-Link/AOL offering me that lifetime free membership. So you AOLers, now you know why AOL still talks about free and per-minute charges. It's to acomodate us fossils.
Not that I had much of a life to begin with, anyway.
----
Your mind is squeezed by a blast of pain!
In fact, this service was free if you downloaded the client yourself. If you didn't already had internet access, you had to buy the 10$ CD or ask a friend to download it for you. It was reasonable because it was available in every post office (every village) and every HMV store, I doubt they made money selling the CD.
The only thing that's news about this is that someone thought this would last a "lifetime". With companies like NetZero and Juno scrambling to keep afloat, and others like Spinway sinking into the depths of f***edcompany.com, it's a wonder anybody has free internet access anymore. Plus, the old addage is true when it comes to free internet services; "you get what you pay for".
It's kind of funny, I was in a post office last week to mail off a letter, and I saw the CDs sitting on the counter. Canada Post selling internet access, I thought to my self, how silly is that?
I looked a little closer at the CD and noticed that it was just a 3web CD. Since 3web went under a while ago, I thought it was strange that Canada Post was still selling the CDs. Oh well, I guess it just took some time for the memo to get around.
Enjoy your job, make lots of money, work within the law. Choose any two.
Only $10 but that's well above free of charge or distrubution costs.
I don't understand how the government allows advertising to be fundamentally different from the terms of service of the product being advertised. We are constantly being inundated with this shit too--it's the rule not the exception.
- How many FREE products are out there where the ad says FREE 50 times in 60 seconds, but in fine print it says there is a $8.00 S&H charge? I call on the FCC to define the meaning of the word "FREE" as "no money changes hands for you to get this product or service".
- If the courts know that it isn't for LIFE but instead until the company goes under, why do advertising regulators allow the phrase FOR LIFE in ANY ads??? I call on the regulators to require that ads FOR LIFE have money in trust in case they go under if they use that phrase.
- Why are ads for diet pills and get rich quick schemes allowed to show testimonial after testimonial of people talking about how product X helped them become smarter, thinner or richer while the tiny print says "Results Not Typical"? Let's require TYPICAL testimonials, how about that! Or require the really skinny people to say in their testimonial "I was AMAZED at how much weight I lost since my results were so atypical!"
I really don't get it. My wife is from Europe, where truthfulness in ads seems to be something the governments still care about, and it has taken her YEARS to build up enough skepticism of ads to not believe all the patently fraudulent bullshit that is perpetrated here.
I understand caveat emptor and all that, but it has really gotten out of hand. When was the last time you saw an ad that was TRUTHFUL! Coke won't make you happy. Miller Lite won't get you girls. A Lexus doesn't make you a successful business man. You can't "Set it and Forget It" with that cheesy chicken roaster. Drinking parseley juice from your $200 juicers isn't going to make you feel younger. Diet-ZX isn't free. OxyClean won't clean your carpets. I doubt Massengil really gives you that "fresh" feeling either.
What are the rules that have to be followed? Are there ANY? Does anyone CHECK the ads? IS ANYONE OUT THERE???
Crash
"The difference between theory and practice is small in theory and large in practice..."
As you should have known, it's Canada. So suing everyone, while a nifty American idea, is unlikely to go over well, especially if the Crown decides it doesn't want to be sued.
...
Yes, that is what I said. Many times I see Yanks make the mistake that the whole world works like the USA. It doesn't. Get over it, already.
What might happen is someone might establish a commission to investigate it, which, years later, will end up having done nothing at all.
So, once again - Canada Post == Crown == no lawsuit unless some silly twit forgot to do his job and toss it into the circular file.
I'm a lumberjack and I'm ok, I work all night, and I get DSL
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
was the spam. They promised to give you free DSL for life - well, you still have DSL, it's just not functional, there's that nice NIC in your PC now, just use it for an extra LAN connection for your internal house network.
Coming soon, free pr0n for life. OK, so it's pictures from a retirement home, but what were you expecting?
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
Is your MP Liberal? :)
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
... in Canada, the internet is quite rampantly dirt cheap ... ... get a couple hours a month for about 15 bucks or so ... and it costs less than 50 bucks a month for high speed ...
Um, I don't know what the exchange rate and whatnot is, but that isn't cheap at all. In california, I pay $37.95 for a DSL line, and before that is $15 for a ppp conection. And paying for X number of hours? I didn't think that kind of madness still happened!
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The way to see by faith is to shut the eye of reason. --Ben Franklin
You get that kind of madness for the cheap internet access. Remember he's quoting Canadian dollars. At home I'm paying $35 a month for unlimited broadband access to the 'net on @Home.
@Home is technically breaking the law in Canada, because I'm on the American backbone. In Canada it is illegal for an ISP to connect to the American backbone directly. They must build their network here. I really want to be on Canarie like the Sympatico subscribers are, but it's $10 more per month with a static IP.God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
How do they get the script viruses to run on Macs?
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
Times have changed,
ISPs are getting worse,
They won't obey their contract,
They just want to fart and curse!
Should we blame the government?
Or blame society?
Or should we blame the images on TV?
No!
Blame Canada! Blame Canada!
With all their beady little eyes,
And flappin' heads so full of lies,
Blame Canada! Blame Canada!
We need to form a full assault!
It's Canada's fault!
Don't blame me for AOL,
They saw the contract loophole,
And now their off to bloody Hell!
And of course Bill Gates,
One had Solaris on his shelf,
But now, when I see him,
He tells me to fsck myself!
Well,
Blame Canada! Blame Canada!
It seems everything's gone wrong
Since Canada came along.
Blame Canada! Blame Canada!
They're not even a real country, anyway.
My ISP could have lasted me until 2094,
Instead it's on the heap like the Adam and Commodore.
Should we blame Jon Katz?
Should we blame Wired?
Or the marketers who allowed it be retired?
Heck, no!
Blame Canada! Blame Canada!
With all their hockey hullabaloo,
And that bitch Anne Murray, too,
Blame Canada!
Last year during the NBA playoffs (Netzero at the Half) they had this commercial with a guy going before congress saying that the internet should be FREE. Everyone cheered.
Now this year everything is "charge per month" and they call it Netzero Platinum, no banner ads, $9.95 a month.
How can a company go back on their word and do deceptive things like this? Lamers...
DIE NETZERO!
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Did you just fart? Or do you always smell like that?
eTrade SUCKS
- A.P.
--
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
On the internet, you can target your audience to a much greater degree than with TV. Additionally you can, to some degree, directly track response to your ads. On top of that, it could easily be proved that the internet audience is wealthier and better educated as a whole than TV audiences, and therefore has more money to spend on an advertisers product.
I am guessing that the 'direct response' aspect of internet ads is also its downfall. If advertisers are primarily looking for click-throughs, then that is the problem. Based on an entirely subjective and anecdotal survey of how internet ads are used, very few(none) of my friends and family click on the ads. However, most of us have learned of companies or products through these ads and later patronized these companies.
The reason we don't click on the ads is because as a whole, we are not impulsive buyers. Since we have the whole internet at our disposal, we will usually do some research on your company and product and compare those to other companies and products. Its not that we didn't read your ad - we just did some more research before buying.
If ads were sold by the number of eyeballs, rather than the number of click-throughs, then theres no reason that advertising shouldn't work.(Right?) However, if its the other way around, then I can easily see how advertising on the net might be tanking.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
- ATTENTION READERS -
The deal of a lifetime!!! Pay a mere $9.95 upfront to Money Makers International, and we will pay you $5 cash at the beginning of every month for the rest of your life!
But wait, there's more! On the first day of the 36th month, we will give you a brand new Ferrari!
What are you waiting for!? Sign up now!
(Offer subject to change at any time, but most likely right after we get your ten bucks.)
Well, (And this is a blatant opinion) in Canada, the internet is quite rampantly dirt cheap.
I get 30 hours a month dialup for my laptop from Sympatico here in Winnipeg for $9.95 About $5 US :-/
And my cable modem for my home network costs me $39 a month. DSL is even cheaper.
Can't complain about the network infrastructure here, Canada Post notwithstanding...
Exchange rate current as of today.
$50 Canadian = $32.89 US
BTW I pay $40/month for cable modem access, that's $26.31 US.
Check out the 3Web Google cache. They guarantee "Never pay for Internet access again". Yeah, right. What a guarantee.
us canucks have WAY better Broadband-for-All goodness than the americans. have you hugged your national broadband taskforce today? :)
The reason this didn't work is because the amount of people with dialup modems is inversely related to the amount of mini dishes being nailed on houses, you just can't see it well.
the only people who have no better option than a dialup anymore live in buttcrack sask... but have no fear... buttcrack will soon have a big phat pipe too
if people can afford a couple grand on their PC they'll pay to have decent net access. the reason this didnt work is becase free dialup is for poor people, and poor people don't own computers.
You have paid for a total of 0 pages and so far 0 have been used up (0 today).
How do they get the script viruses to run on Macs?
I dunno but I wouldn't be surprised. Many office document macros are cross-platform.
Shucks, now I gotta quit bragging to people about how they needn't bother me with the latest virus warnings, since my machine's not affected.
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
First they try this goofy PosteCS system which, as far as I can tell, is directly trying to compete with encrypted e-mail (we can blame the US, Canada, AND France for this dumb idea).
Then they try this eBillPay idea to send checks through the internet, which is competing with exactly the same service that is offered by most major banks (actually, since everybody seems to call it "eBillPay," I'm not sure who really is in control of it).
And finally in the case of Canada Post, they decide trying to branch out into an entirely new realm: The ISP business. This is really interesting in and of itself because they'll have to outsource at least part of it to the local telecommunications people (I'm not sure what's state-owned up there and what's not).
The USPS seems to be getting some sense and doing more with the net. According to their website, they'll print letters and cards and such and mail them instead of just checks (which sounds a lot like a telegram). But that still has to compete with e-mail.
Personally, I think their best bet is to become digital certificate authorities/digital key signatories/something along those lines. It could be seen as an expansion of their existing services instead of branching out into new ones, as a lot of what they offer is confirmation of mailing, delivery, receipt, insurance, protecting message/package from point A to point B, and so on.
And since it's already a fellony to defraud them and they have their own law enforcement arm, they could do a hell of a lot more than what Verisign could do when they gave a Microsoft certificate to the wrong guy ("I'm sorry, you'll have to download this new Windows patch... We promise it won't happen again!").
Hell, if I can get my passport at the post office...
The reason this is in there is because something that is Free can not have any value and, pardon the gross simplification, thus you can not be suid if anything goes wrong.
So the question I ask is does a "Free" ISP have a simeler loop hole in it?
Ascii artist &
I live in BC. I pay $45/mo for DSL+modem rental; if I buy my own modem, it's $35/mo.
Exchange rate is 60-odd cents. Do the math: we've got cheap Internet.
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--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Canada is evil and they are trying to take over the world. Canada must be stopped.
Oh wait, I thought Canada was part of Microsoft. Nevermind.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
well, no, there's actually still us DSL users who get very fast DSL that works very well for less than some of you probably pay for limited dial-up, never mind the cheap DSL that's only 5x as fast as dial-up when it even works... But it would be sad to see the number of intelligent people on the internet (and slashdot) diminish.
---
They that quote Benjamin Franklin on liberty and safety deserve neither.
It actually works really well on carpets. You just have to clean the carpet before the stain sets in. Don't be disparaging an actual good product.
CAVEAT EMPTOR.
It takes a week to get a 1kg package from New Zealand Regina Saskatchewan. It also takes a week to get a letter from a place 5 hours away from Regina to Regina. This make sense?
Makes sense to me. Actual transport in bulk, whether across town or across the world, is easy, fast, and cheap. Having human beings read each individual address (often hand-written) and make sure it ends up in exactly the right place, losing or misplacing fewer than one in a thousand properly addressed packages, is hard, slow, and expensive.
I know from experience that city-to-city letter mail usually only takes 2-3 days, so I'll assume that you're talking about mail from rural Saskatchewan.
One day to pick up, one day to sort, one day to transport by truck, another day to sort, and one for final delivery. Change that to one day to transport by air, and you've got the same schedule for intra-province from a rural area and for international mail. Sure, they could do it overnight, but you'd have to pay for it, and most people would rather wait for an extra few days than pay fifty times as much for postage (to get overnight mail to or from a small town, you'd basically have to hire a guy to drive or fly out a handful of packages every day; ridiculously expensive).
--
Last time I checked, all the free ISPs (in the United States) had folded except for K-Mart's. I still have one of their CDs, and I was thinking about installing it so I'd have a backup ISP in case my DSL line went down.
Or has the Bluelight deal gone south as well?
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
Now whatever gave me the notion it was a private company?
Thanks for reducing my ignorance, a favor I am always grateful for. =)
-Kasreyn
P.S. the mafia thing was totally in jest, for anyone who read it while under the influence of no sense of humor.
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
And their disgusting ads which sits on the top of ur screen, u can't minimize or remove it, takes approx. 30% of your system resources on a winblows9x/me. That's why even if you have 1Gb of ram or 1Ghz of cpu, in ur peecee, you'll still crash your system by opening say, 6 Internet explorers.
Lame software. u say upgrade to Linux or windows NT/2K? it's not avail. for that OS! tsk... tsk... lame just lame.
You've hit the nail on the head, I think... if I had my way, we'd have no truth in advertising whatsoever. Car commercials would show the cars going 200mph, then extruding wings and lifting off to shoot down the Soviet invaders, all for just $19.95. Fast-food places would say that their milkshakes cured cancer. Microsoft would say that failure to use their software was a license violation punishable by law. People would have to actually do some research, or talk to their friends, to find out which products were good enough to buy, everyone would get accustomed to the idea that the stuff that comes out of corporate mouthpieces is greed-laced extract of horseshit, and we'd all be a lot better off.
Similar things apply to the laws that keep Las Vegas "fair" by limiting the casinos to removing your money at a fixed, gradual rate, but I digress...
THE FACT BIT: The headline on this article is misleading. All 3-Web/Cybersurf services are being cancelled-- not just the ones resold through Canada Post. I don't know what it's like in other Canadian cities, but here, you could buy a "Free Internet For Life" 3Web CD from the local variety store (actually, you still can-- 3Web evidently hasn't told its resellers about its nefarious plan yet). They were rebranded and sold or given out by numerous companies (e.g. HMV)-- I guess that was their plan: targeted advertising.
THE RANTY BIT: Now while 'Free Internet For Life' may be an impossible claim, those people (like my girlfriend) who bought the CD based on its advertising got very little 'Free Internet' (as little as 5 days!). I've encouraged her (and the few other people I know who bought a 3Web CD) not to go onto 3Web/Cybersurf's new pay-for-internet plan, because the faster the backlash of false advertising runs this company into the ground, the better.
END BIT: Anyway, that's my rant. Apologies for the disjointedness. I guess I'm just pissed off that now I've got to do the extra work of getting my girlfriends and other friends signed up to REAL internet accounts. $^#%#%$@!!!
SIG BIT:
They also sell pre-paid cell phone cards at post offices. Does Canada Post run any cell phone networks? NO!
Damn, you people are stupid. There's a post office in the Shopper's Drug Mart at King and Yonge... does Canada Post sell shampoo now too?
Did you have to buy the $9.95 CD to sign up? If so, the terms of service should be enforceable as a contract. And while down here in the States our Commandeerer in Chief doesn't understand that lawsuits to enforce contracts are the very foundation of the common legal system, you may have a leg to stand on. The original $9.95 may count as "consideration" in return for which you contracted to receive Internet service for life. A lot of guarantees for life are carefully worded to apply to the life of the product rather than of the individual. Has the Internet worn out? If not, hire a lawyer to enforce your rights. We have a few who won't be busy making sure insurance companies pay for health care according to their own policy, since Dubya thinks that contract enforcement leads to "frivilous lawsuits." Bob
What he said. Also, (in my blatant opinion) the service
really, really sucks.
My parents, who are extremely frugal, wanted to get on the Internet.
I told them about a local ISP that charged $10-20 a month (CDN) but
then my dad saw the 3Web ads. Well, free is better than a monthly
fee. I was curious about this so I agreed to try to set them up.
Remember, the 'rents are really cheap^H^H^H^H^Hfrugal. Their computer
is a recycled 486 running Windows 3.1. 3Web needed Windows 95 or
better. Fortunately, I'd gotten sick of Diablo so I gave them my
copy. Their PC has enough RAM to actually run Windows well, so no
problems there.
I then spent a full weekend wrestling with the thing. Windows 95 was
its usual charming self and much profanity was issued. Only after I'd
gotten it working did I notice the requirements on the 3Web CD:
"Requires multimedia Pentium or better". I installed the software
anyway. More profanity ensued but I eventually got most of it
working.
Actually signing up was like kicking dead whales down the beach. The
entire user interface was based on Flash or something similar and I
could actually watch the drop-down menus being drawn. Eventually
though, I got the thing usable. I even read slashdot with Internet
Explorer.
But it still sucked, even then. There was a giant animated
advertising bar. Since the 'rents only had a 14" monitor (cheap,
remember?) the bar would occupy the top quarter of the screen and
cover the title bars of every window. The ad bar stayed on top of
everything, of course, so there was no way to get at the controls of
IE. When I finally managed to move and resize it to usability, I had
maybe three vertical inches of visible web browser.
Real useful, folks.
And, of course, the ad-bar showed full motion video, which ran at top
priority and slowed the system down to a crawl. I got far enough to
know that it worked and turned it off. Since then, my parents haven't
used it once. They keep talking about it but I suspect that the sheer
repulsiveness of the whole experience will keep them off the Internet
for the forseeable future.
What were 3Web thinking? Yes, I used an old, underpowered computer
with their service and so arguably I deserve what I get, but do you
really expect people who are willing to pay serious money for a
computer not to fork over another $10 a month for a real ISP? That
makes for an utterly ludicrous marketting demographics--people who are
willing to spend quite a lot of money on a relatively new computer and
display but willing to accept a vastly inferior Internet experience
solely to save a bit of pocket change.
The bottom line is that (in my opinion) 3Web was just another badly
thought out dot-com idea that somehow got Canada Post involved in
their scheme and subsequently ran out of venture capital. They
deserve what they get.
In case no one noticed this "reporter" never got comment from the company. In the Ottawa Citizen (a Canadian paper) a reporter actually spoke with the president of Cybersurf, Paul Mercia, who said there will be no changes to the Canada Post users. Canada Post usrs can continue to get free Internet Access indefinitley because of the contract between 3web and Canada Post. However that does not say anything for the hundreds of thousands of generic 3Web users (the Canada Post thing was a co-branding between the two companies) those who are accessing 3Web without Canada Post software will be cut off on July 16th. Happy hunting for a new service.
I don't quite get it. Advertising supports TV just fine. Furthermore, all TV gives you is a rough guesstimate of how many viewers watched an ad. They have no idea who is channel surfing, snacking or going to the bathroom. How is it that TV advertising is so expensive and profitable to the stations that sell it?
On the internet, you can target your audience to a much greater degree than with TV. Additionally you can, to some degree, directly track response to your ads. On top of that, it could easily be proved that the internet audience is wealthier and better educated as a whole than TV audiences, and therefore has more money to spend on an advertisers product.
I am guessing that the 'direct response' aspect of internet ads is also its downfall. If advertisers are primarily looking for click-throughs, then that is the problem. Based on an entirely subjective and anecdotal survey of how internet ads are used, very few(none) of my friends and family click on the ads. However, most of us have learned of companies or products through these ads and later patronized these companies.
The reason we don't click on the ads is because as a whole, we are not impulsive buyers. Since we have the whole internet at our disposal, we will usually do some research on your company and product and compare those to other companies and products. Its not that we didn't read your ad - we just did some more research before buying.
If ads were sold by the number of eyeballs, rather than the number of click-throughs, then theres no reason that advertising shouldn't work.(Right?) However, if its the other way around, then I can easily see how advertising on the net might be tanking.
Miranda's murder was never solved because the suspect invoked his right to remain silent. Now that's ironic.
but I was out of town.
Good point, but if we look at any normal investment (say, public company), risks must be disclosed. Failure to disclose known risks (including forseeable financial problems, acts of god, etc) can also land the company in court.
I'm not saying sue them, but refund some people their money. It's ignorant to say 'free for life' if you know you can't do it. I'd think it would have been obvious from the start (did they really think they'd be handing out free access 50 or 60 years later?).
Really, the word 'free' gets abused, in many contexts, and it pisses me off.