End of the Free Internet

efedora writes: "The End of Free keeps a list of the various transitions to paid services from free net sites. The list is getting longer. When I think of an individual site that's really worthwhile I say to myself, "Sure, that site is worth $4.95 a month". The problem is there are going to be lots of sites at $$$ a month and it sure adds up." Of course even Slashdot is planning on rolling out subscriptions-for-no-banner-ads sometime soon, so I suppose we're not entirely immune to the subscription bug either.

Comments

Re:subscriptions for non-banner-ads

[DrSkwid]

Run a webserver on your local machine.

and put

<script>
window.close()
</script>

in the error page associated with 127.0.0.1

Re:subscriptions for non-banner-ads

[Tackhead]

> There's more ads than information, now.

No shit. For good laughs, cut-and-paste the text of a news article into a text editor, then save the HTML and compare the difference.

I believe the current record for lowest S/N ratio (ignoring tomshardware.com's practice of putting one sentence per page ;-) for a mainstream news site is http://www.theglobeandmail.com.

Ad-laden CNN serves 22,700 bytes of HTML for a 1400-byte story.

The Globe and Mail delivers a staggering 90,587 bytes of HTML for a 3082-byte story.

Those numbers are for surfers who surf with images off, by the way. The bloat is Javashit, banners, towers, stock quotes, polls, and navigation to every section of the newspaper. I don't even want to think about what it'd be like with graphics on.

And these jerkwads wonder why their bandwidth bills are so high.

Don't like to pay? Set up your own site.

[MikeFM]

You can get a decent site with Perl/PHP and MySQL support for around $10 a month with enough space and bandwidth for a medium sized site if you keep things like graphics at a minimum. Programming a site is easy and there are even free packages available for most common types of sites for those that aren't good programmers. I think you'll find that as many of the big free sites turn to pay or die that more small sites will show up.

If you remember a few years ago there were lots of small free sites that eventually got ate by the big portal sites or just gave up as they couldn't compete for users attention with so many big name companies giving away the same stuff. Those forces are disappearing so now is your chance to have your own little slice of the Net again. :)

On my projects page you can see that I'm beginning to work on providing easy to use plug-n-play style components to build sites from. If anyone cares to help please do. So far I've used this exact code in several commercial sites and it's working fine so I have no reason to think it won't work for free sites. You don't need to make a profit from a site if it's not costing you a lot of money.