Slashdot Mirror
Piro On Why .Coms Don't Work
cabbey writes: "Say the name MegaTokyo and most people, if they recognize it, think 'one of the best manga/comics on the net today. (ignoring the recent 'stick figure dom' days while Piro was moving).' But few people think about the social, economic and philosophic issues the authors' rants can delve into. This morning Piro put up a rather long 'rant' that's really a catching insight into why the dot-com world didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of surviving. (archive link to the rant in question, it's below the comic. ;) "
I fail to see how a comic artist's "rant" about economy is newsworthy. Perhaps an attempt to plug one's own site?
That is all.
... a good slashdotting is just what Piro needs.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
I'm lucky, because i just checked today's comic (if there was any) about 5 minutes ago... i'm assuming piro's site is going to be down for a couple of hours. Not to mention, they just had a server relocation which caused them to be down for a week ;-)
"The ones who dont do anything are always the ones who try to pull you down" -- Henry Rollins
Have we heard enough about why the .com "era" failed? Enough "dot bomb" and other witty phrases refering to a once disturbingly propserous era. The fact is that people got dumb for a while. Things have worked for a certain way for a long time. I am sick and tired of reading the news about how someone on wall street had a bad weekend and now the nasdaq is down 200 points. Little do we know it, it is a coffee shop across the street of the trading rooms that switched their regular coffee to folgers crystals two years ago - lets see what happens?
Say the name MegaTokyo and most people, if they recognize it, think 'one of the best manga/comics on the net today. (ignoring the recent 'stick figure dom' days while Piro was moving).' But few people think about the social, economic and philosophic issues the authors' rants can delve into. This morning Piro put up a rather long 'rant' that's really a catching insight into why the dot-com world didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of surviving.
Mr. Katz:
If you can't even post commentaries under your own identity anymore for fear of 200 comments blasting your credibility and cliched statements, I think it's time you pack your bags and leave.
Sincerely,
Slashdot Users, #2 - #570,000
;-)
Is this story being run because MegaTokyo runs banner ads on Slashdot? I can't think of any other reason why it would be called news.
I knew it would get /.'d, so here it is:
As you can see, there is no comic today - that's my fault, and involves many factors (the most significant of which is my complete and utter inability to draw tonight. once you go thru 10 sheets of paper its time to face facts and go to plan 'b') So, you get a new comic Thursday and Friday this week instead of Wednesday and Friday. What's a few more hate e-mail this week, i'll live.
I have a tendency to forget things sometimes. Like, for instance, Sweetest Day. Valentines day. Seraphim's Birthday. The fact that you buy gifts for people at Christmas. Things like that.
Even when i do remember these things, the execution of them often has tragic results. I don't send Seraphim flowers typically. Mostly because of one incident where i sent her this amazingly beautiful arrangement that had pollen so toxic that we had to lock the bouquet in the bathroom to keep it from killing her. This florist has subsequently gone out of business.
When it comes to gifts, i'm not big on 'oh, its a holiday, i gotta find something, anything' kind of gift giver. I'd rather come up with something REALLY nice, or really useful. This attitude towards gift giving makes it harder than normal to find things for the people in your life. More often than not, i tend to push off these shopping tasks until it is too late, resulting in the 'pick up anything you can find' method of shopping the day before you need it (i've purchased chirstmas presents on christmas day. Yes, i am that pathetic.)
Anyways, as you might expect, valentines day this year was even worse than usual. Seraphim told me without hesitation that she was more than happy with the botched shirt and candy box gift i attempted to give her days earlier (long story), but i still felt BAD for not having something to give her on valentines day itself. So, i think to myself, i'll send her an e-card! Yea! the ultimate loser geek thing to send to your girl.
For years, i've been sending out Blue Mountain Arts cards to Seraphim, often forgetting that i had already sent her that particular card (bear themed cards are popular between us) but even so, i don't do it THAT regularly. So imagine my surprise when i pulled up Blue Mountain Arts that day and discovered that this once free service was now something you had to pay for.
So, as a loving boyfriend, did i pony up the dough and send her a card? Hell no.
There's an inherent part of human nature that just makes you bristle at having to suddenly pay for something that you didn't have to pay for before. Have a great free service? Sure, people will use it and love it. The business model that says 'give it to them for a while for free so they fall in love with it, then start charging them?' - er, sorry guys. Nice business model, absolutely no understanding of human nature. Since a significant portion of the dot-com economy was based on this model, it should have been no surprise to anyone that the whole thing fell on it's collective ass.
I can totally understand why Blue Mountain Arts switched to a pay for use model. All that traffic has to use a LOT of bandwidth, and with companies no longer hosing advertising dollars around without any real worries as to whether it was effective or not, there's gotta be some way to pay the bills. So, the idea that you get a significant chunk of your users to pay a small fee makes a lot of sense - after all, you get a LOT of people to pay a LITTLE money, you're problems are over, right? Sadly, i don't think this is really the case. It goes against the very nature of the web.
Lets face it. One of the reasons people LIKE the internet is that it gives people access to a LOT of information and entertainment for very low cost. It's not free - most of us pay a reasonable amount of money for bandwidth and internet connections - but on the net we pretty much like to think that once we've paid admission, we're free to roam and do whatever we like. Transferring information on the net is CHEAP. its so cheap, you can pretty much give it away for free. If people like it, they keep coming back for more. The commodity of the internet isn't money, it's access. It's connections. You're wealth in net terms is defined by 'what you have access to'.
We all have friends or people we know who can find just about anything, legal or otherwise, on the net with little or no effort. MP3 files are a good model to look at for this. A lot of great music is pretty much free for the asking at sites like mp3.com but most of the files traded around aren't really 'legal'. Are people really willing to pay for Mp3 files? Not really, because we already have it in our minds that mp3s are a 'free' resource. We don't feel we get any value buy paying for it. If we DO slap down money for music, we want the tangible piece of circular plastic where we can say 'this is mine'.
Then there is this rather interesting phenomenon that often occurs. Once you have the CD, you burn MP3 files and make them available for others over the net. Why would someone do that? Because it adds value to their purchase. We get not only the music, but the added benefit of having added something to the collective pool of information. You've added access to this music, you've increased your own online 'wealth'.
One of the reasons i started Fredart years and years ago was that i found that i wanted to provide my own thing to the 'pool'. For anime fans, especially back then, there was this whole world of japanese anime and manga where entire series lay waiting to be discovered. If nothing else, you could take all the information available on them, collect it together into a webpage, and make it more easily available for people seeking info on a particular series. At the time, I remember noticing that there were no web pages on 3x3 Eyes, so i decided that i would make one. Pai's Page was, really, the first web page on the series, and i did a fairly good job on it. Once making it, however, i had little interest in working any further on it. There was something that just wasn't satisfying about just re-arranging what was, in effect, someone elses work.
Around that time i started to explore japanese websites that revolved around anime and manga. In japan, it was considered bad form to just scan and post copywrited images, so japanese fans found that the best way they could express their loyalty and love for a series and its characters was to do their own fan works. I really liked this model, and Fredart was direct derivative of those style of pages. I wanted to provide NEW material to the web, not just stuff i had found surfing around, or even stuff scanned out of magazines. I was adding something original to the pool, not just reorganizing and recollecting.
I think that one of the things you get when you add to the pool, so to speak, is a certain amount of respect. you don't just take, you give as well. The net lends itself well to new ways that people can provide things to the collective pool. You don't need to be sponsored and paid for by some big media company to get your work in front of millions of people. The old model was that you had to be able to convince a bunch of people with lots of money that you were worth promoting before you even had a chance to see if people would respond to your work on a grand scale. This lead, for the longest time, to the sad state where only a small number of people decided what the public was going to see. Also, since these same people convinced all of us over the years that ONLY people that they felt were good enough to promote were worthy of entertaining us, that we should not waste our time entertaining ourselves - only paid for entertainment was worthy entertainment. Worked great till the net came along.
The net shatters some of the basic structures that people have used for ages to control the dissemination of information. Easy to send, easy to duplicate. The Dot com economy was doomed from the onset because it was formed on the basis of the idea that by just getting out there and capturing the attention of a big chunk of the internet population, the money would just start flowing in. Heh. Some hard lessons have been learned. It doesn't really work that way.
If you think about it, the real currency on the net isn't money. It's respect. Either as an individual or as an entity you gain respect by providing either new material to the net pool, or you provide effective and useful ways for people to access information that is already out there. A lot of big sites that do this started out small (even yahoo. i remember when it was just a link list over at Stanford run by two guys). Of course, respect doesn't pay the bills, so there always comes a time where you have to start looking at how to not only survive, but maybe even prosper a little on all this.
It's in this armature where the real economic viability of the net rests. There is no direct relationship between turning respect into dollars, but that doesn't mean to say that there isn't some relationship between the two. In my opinion, i feel there is a trade off - when you start charging for what you provide, you loose some of the respect you've earned, because now people have traded cash for it. The nature of the relationship has changed. When you move to a pay-for-services model, it completely changes the nature of the interaction between a site and its users. It's especially bad if people suddenly have to pay for something that was, for the longest time, free. Honestly, i think that it's human nature to almost feel 'betrayed' - which, of course, leads to a real loss of hit points in the respect column. ^_^;; The paradox here is that once people loose respect for a site, won't they be less willing to pay for it?
Odd train of thought, huh? I've had to think a lot about stuff like this lately. Running a site like MT is expensive - we've crested 10 million page views this month already, but at the same time the site is almost no different than it was when it was a non-working html template that i had pieced together over a weekend a year and a half ago. Largo and I really do, i think, have a little bit of an understanding of what makes MT what it is - tho i do have to tell you the mind boggles at why so MANY people seem to find the site worth visiting - and with that understanding comes a responsibility to make sure that whatever we do to help keep the site alive NEVER messes with those things. To me, the respect people have shown me over the years for all the hard work and dedication we've put into the site is something i never want to trade in on - because its worth more than any amount of money to me.
I suppose that its the post-dotcom economy sites that now bear the burden of figuring out how to survive in the wired. How DO you survive, pay hosting bills, make enough money to support yourself and others who help run the site? Traditional business model ways of looking at things has already proven that we all know less than we thought we did. Largo and i do it the hard way - we both work full time jobs AND do this silly site. This is not, of course, ideal, and speaks more about our lack of useful brain cells than any kind of success as a website.
I think that an understanding of human nature is almost more important here on the web than in any other business environment. Why? because unlike in the real world we are used to, we've been trained to an 'us and them' mentality in regards to our entertainment and things that we purchase in stores - we are consumers, they are providers. On the net, its different. We are all one in the same - fredart.com was just as accessible as ibm.com. We all can make websites. We all KNOW we have the ability to reach millions of people. Many sites, even Megatokyo itself, has proven that individuals can do this. You dont need to be a big corporation. We all have the same basic presence on the net - its how we use it that makes us who we are here.
Oh, and Seraphim's reaction to me being so cheap that i wasn't willing to pay for a subscription to Blue Mountain Arts to send her a valentines day e-card? Her answer was, if you think about it, not surprising: "The hell with that. you're little ASCII heart was so cute."
It's not the money you spend, its the thought that goes into it. You can't buy respect, you can only earn it.
"Study your math, kids. Key to the universe." -The Archangel Gabriel
I think people used that arguement when cable TV was in its infancy.
Offer people a good product, at the price the market is willing to bear, and they will buy it.
Interesting commentary in the rant about the concept of people not wanting to suddenly pay for something historically free. I wonder what will happen once the current generation of users accustomed to free content is replaced by a newer one more accustomed to fees? Will there be a more lucrative dot-com explosion then?
People will balk initially at paying for content, but I think they'll gradually get used to it. I remember being pissed that I'm paying for cable AND for the commercials they're sending me, but now I've just come to accept it.
Mind you, I think this is a lousy thing to happen, but I can't think of a way to thwart it. Our only hope are the sites spewing out free content to contrast with the ones providing it for cost. As long as these places go on, it will be hard to corner people into paying.
It seems the article isn't so much about why dot-com's fail, but rather why:
1) People want everything in life for free
2) The Author is too cheap to pony up a little bit of dough to send out an animated card.
Since he runs a site and knows the costs behind running a site, one would think he'd be the first to want to SUPPORT a site by signing up.
Hmmm.... well if we keep slashdotting all of 'em, they'll never stand a chance! bwhahahaha!
--
Some weasel took the cork out of my lunch.
I was going to write about what everyone already knows (capital, pointless product, worthless hype) but we all know it so.
No shit it won't work.
In my opinion, the one flaw in his theory is, he thinks you can't buy respect. I say you can. money is power, take a look around it's a big rat race. I say, everyone has a price, i'm sure he does too. It's the same reason big music artists "sell-out". Oh and let's face it, there isn't much most people wouldn't do for the almighty dollar.
"i can never say no to anyone but you"
The commodity of the internet isn't money, it's access. It's connections.
From what I've seen, this is true in almost every business. In the highest levels, money may be something to be considered, but political (or family, or social, or whatever) connections usually have more weight in the decision-making.
On another note, maybe from a geek's point of view, information wants to be free (as in speech) but your average Internet surfer wants information to be free (as in beer), so they dont have to "waste" their money getting it (as in cheap bastards).
Great rant, though. Too bad we can't moderate websites to give him a few (+1, Insightful) Karma points.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
Considering one of the main points Piro is trying to make about the value of respect for a site/company/individual, and how poorly this has been strongarmed into squeezing money out of customers, in particular for an originally free service. Considering the pay services for Slashdot in the works, I find this posting ironic to say the least.
/. t shirts on thinkgeek, how about some cool items. An engraved /. (the symbol) metal coffe mug? A swiss army knife with green handle and inlayed /. symbol? People are a lot more willing to give money if they are under the impressions they are gaining something, in particular something physical for their money. SLashdot should take note.
Megatokyo has my respect, big time. I have at least 6 shirts of there's, two others I gave the girlfriend, and as soon as Im gainfully employed again, Im buying that 'F33r my l33t n3k1d sk1llz' boxer shorts. They've made some money off of me, and they earned it. I just wished it was enough for them to work full time; daily updates to megatokyo would be reason for me to leap out of bed with a smile on my face each and every morning.
Perhaps Slashdot could do something similiar? Instead of the subscription service, some merchandizing would be better. Instead of the lame
Toodles D. Clown
Just in case the sarcasm didn't get through to all of you; a good slashdotting is *not* what he needs. Here's a link to a rant about his bandwidth costs, for good measure.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
nothing too new here, methinks "great teacher"
Largo's view on it would make for a better read.
(by better i mean odd, twisted, amusing and schizophrenic)
We're not getting a new comic until tomorrow, I'd have been royally pissed if I couldn't get my MT fix cuz of slashdotting. I get really cranky when I don't get to see my MT. It's definitely one of the best comics out there.
I'm the big fish in the big pond bitch.
He puts out an okay manga (a little too cliched and too close to the typical "AH! My Goddess" and "Hand Maid May" type of stories about some lonesome geek for it to be a "great" manga)
.com bombs at all! He only covers one specific model of offering a service for free and then turning it pay afterwards.
/.
.COM failure. It isn't well organized or presented in a clear fashion.
But anyways...
How is it that Piro can rant on what amounts to his personal weblog and people take notice?
First off, he doesn't cover the
I don't even think that was (is) a business model to begin with. It was more a necessity after banner ads became obviously ineffective. Once you start losing revenue on a free service it's pretty obvious that you simply start charging for that service. Just look at Something Awful. Lowtax didn't charge for forum access initially, but after the whole eFront debacle and the realization that banner ads don't work, he had to turn it over to a pay site.
This wasn't a planned business model. It was the result of the necessity to recoup some lost revenue.
So right off Piro is dead wrong.
And then it all of a sudden turns into his own little time-machine going back to the days of his first 3x3 eyes web site and then goes into a (farily arrogant) rant about "Oh, I CREATE I don't copy".
Give me a break. This shouldn't even have made it on
I'm thinking Hemos was suffering from a mid-morning hangover when he put this through. There is _NOTHING_ worthwhile about this rant by Piro. Nothing that makes me THINK or QUESTION about the subject of the
You want some GOOD writing on the subject, go check out disenchanted.com and stop feeding your brain this Internet junk food crap.
I think that one of the things you get when you add to the pool, so to speak, is a certain amount of respect. ...and just like in real life, no one respects you when all you add to the pool is pee.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
We get not only the music, but the added benefit of having added something to the collective pool of information. You've added access to this music, you've increased your own online 'wealth'.
Yes, increased your online wealth by stealing from the artist.Don't you get your hand cut off for theft in Japan?
Strange words to be coming from an artist...?
The problem with the dot com boom/bust is that it seemed like a grand experiment that failed. The Internet is still a fairly new idea, and business on it was never done before.
Everyone expected it to do well, people invested heavily, not realizing the risk involved.
I'm not afraid of falling, it's the sudden stop at the end that frightens me.
This late post is dedicated to Jin Wicked
For giving out for free what I consider the best web comic out there, GETTING SLASHDOTTED IS NOT THE ANSWER.
Heh, if anyone's been following Piro's rants lately, you know that he switched web hosts, and that he spent many days trimming down the site, all the graphics, trying to get file sizes as small as possible to LOWER his bandwidth costs. I think you guys just blew all his hard work!
Now, there have been people who have requested that he set up a PayPal account or something so that we readers could donate to the MegaTokyo cost, but Piro won't have any of it. In his rant today, he explains why. He feels that if people PAY for his comic, that people tend to feel like they DESERVE the comic, as if they bought a service, instead of RESPECTING the work that Piro gives out for free. If you want to support MegaTokyo, buy some stuff from the MegaTokyo store. You get cool swag, Piro and Largo get some cash to help run MegaTokyo, and we're all happy!
-Kefabi
You truly are a man to be honored and revered. Because of you, I laughed this morning. I laughed and felt full of joy because you trolls are genuinely funny. Without your trolls, I am not sure what I would do. Probably live a depressed, boring, meaningless life. Thank you so much for the joy you bring to my life.
Sincerely,
Anonymous Coward
I found this article not insightful at all...just a couple of obvious points everyone has heard before.
I'm not sure why this was linked to, but I personally feel like it was a waste of my time to read it. Only note this because I would say that this is not typical of most of the links on this site.
This statement interested me. In my opinion Google is both the most respected search engine and web site on the net (sorry /.). If Google started charging tomorrow, suppose it's $5 a month, would I lose respect for them and would I pay for it?
The answer is that no I wouldn't loose respect because I respect their product. Yes I would pay for it because their content is valuable to me.
God forbid this ever happens but it's worth considering. If you are offering value for money you won't loose respect from your users. If your content is worth $0.00 then thats the maximum you can charge.
Yes, increased your online wealth by stealing from the artist ... Strange words to be coming from an artist...?
He's not advocating that you do this. He is stating it as a fact-of-life on the internet. Which it is.
Well, here we go. I visit Megatokyo daily, and I both cringed and laughed when I saw a full story here on Slashdot about the rant.
From what I understand, Piro (et al.) have refused to put a donations button on their site, instead trying to "make it commercially" on their own. At the moment, that takes the form of getting people to buy their art in the form of t-shirts and the like.
But Piro (et al.), from my understanding, are also gearing up for a printed work; Taking the archival strips and trying to find a publisher.
While more power to them, it's interesting that they will be charging for what they have given away for free. :)
Notably, they've reduced the resolution of the archival artwork online. Ostensibly to reduce bandwidth fees. (I do believe that, somewhat, but it also has the effect of rendering the archival images somewhat pixelated and not very printable.) In response, a number of the Megatokyo community members have mirrored the original strips in their original resolution, however that won't help with the new strips coming online.
While they are trying to be more commercial (by their own insistance), there has been a fair amount of "drama" in some rants and IRC talk from Piro's camp, which at times appears, in my opinion, to be less than professional (which is fine if you're not trying to be a commercial entity).
Inclusive in this angst is talk about their rising monthly costs. I can only imagine what a good Slashdotting will do for Piro's blood pressure. Plus the influx of new members on the site and message board will surely grind their server to a halt and keep their bandwidth peaked.
By not accepting donations, (and by modifying his site so it incidentally supports his move toward being a commercial entity) he may be biting the hand that wants to feed him (but can't afford $20 t-shirts). I hope he makes it commercially in the next few days before the bandwidth fees hit him. :)
I love the art, style and story at Megatokyo. I wish them well, whether they choose to be commercial or not. And yes, I would buy a softcover printed Megatokyo book/anthology.
Slashdot: Everything in Moderation, including Moderation itself.
I think he's pointing out something blindingly obvious about the human condition - I bet 90% of the people trading MP3s don't give it a second thought. They probably feel all l337. Doesn't make it right, but it explains the motivations of 90% of music-sharers.
Those motivations are what these companies and industry groups (Sony, RIAA, MPAA, TWAT...) need to understand.
I don't agree with smashing IP law and having a free-for-all, but the obvious non-understaning of what makes netizens tick is what makes me so angry when these stupid IP lawsuits get thrown about like so much Cheez-Wiz.
Face it, content creators, it's a new paradigm out there. Adjust, destroy, or be destroyed...
GTRacer /. needs is a "Nani Naze /." page...
- What
Defending IP by destroying access to it? That makes sense, RIAA/MPAA. Go to the corner until you can play nice!
Note the quotation marks around "wealth". He was speaking hypothetically. This was more of a philosophical rant then anything else. In no way do I see Piro endorsing any kind of theft in this statement.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
The Internet should be renamed InformationNet and we can get this all over with quickly.
The best online ventures are the ones which provide end users access to information they didn't have anymore.
Slashdot, for example.
See, it was *built* to provide easy access to information. It's what the Internet is good at.
The Internet was *not* built to replace the shopping mall - a place which is usually entirely void of any useful information about anything.
See? It's all very simple.
I'm a 2000 man.
Well, let's see. We've had billions of people without a clue telling us why dot coms have failed. We've even had a few industry experts tell us why.
:p More seriously, this is nothing more than a shameless plugging. There's no new insight, there's nothing there that hasn't been said already about dot coms.
Now we've got a comic artist telling us why.
Screw it, I'm going to jump in, too. You know why they failed?
$1000 chair budgets. That's $1k per employee.
Heh.
It's easy to write a piece about why they all failed after they all failed. Is this article really telling us anything we didn't already know?
Think For Yourself. Question Authority.
The 'net really is about communism. In trade for taking, everyone has to throw something in for it to be as good as it can possibly be. Of course, in an ideal world, everyone would have equal access to connection and other hardware resources also, so here again it is the person with the most money that wins. But, as the author pointed out, a good part of having a successful or popular website is respect. Respect translates into word of mouth advertising, which is the only way that a site can become more popular. Anyway, then he went into some details about translating respect into the resources needed to continue running a site. Not as a business, but as a Web Artist. (and really, if you aren't offering some SERVICE, you are a web artist).
.20 per month in tax.
.art or something). I'm sure there's other things you could do also, but this is just another one of my stream of consciousness posts so I won't start down that path now.
I like an idea like this:
1. Everyone pays a tax on their internet connection. Say 1% of the total cost per year. On a 20/month line, it would be
2. All the tax money goes into a large pool. Think National Endowment for the Arts.
3. Here's the tricky part, distributing the money to those who deserve it most (because they are respected): First, although businesses and for profit sites have to pay the tax, they don't get to decide where any of the money goes. After all, they are already making money. Second, anyone who is not contributing in some way to the community can't decide either. This is a little harsh, but necessary.
So, follow me here, EVERYONE/THING on the internet pays the tax, but only people who contribute not-for-profit can get money back. Ok, now into distribution: The total amount of money is evenly divided by the number of sites. Each site gets to handle their share. Now, the people who run the sites have to "donate" their share to other sites. This can be done using a point system (like Slashdot). Any unused money goes back into the coffer and is evenly distributed for real to all the sites. Those sites which got more donations recieve that much more of the money.
Of course, there are issues with this like slackers putting up one line and claiming to be a contributer, but those can be cleared up with intelligent webcrawlers and the like. It must be as unbureaucratic and as community oriented as possible. The organizing body would have to run some sort of website ranking sites by how many donations they have and in categories, and then at the end of the month, they all get rewarded for their command of respect by getting real money which can help cover their costs. It's really fair, encourages participation in the community, and separates commercial enterprise from the community as much as possible. It might even be cool to have a separate TLD for those sites (.nonprofit or
Cool! Amazing Toys.
"Offer people a good product, at the price the market is willing to bear, and they will buy it."
Um... well, obviously. The question here is more about whether the market is willing to bear any viable price at all.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
i thought i was the first to do an ascii heart!!!
Well, this rant by Piro doesn't surprise me in the least. Besides, it will help condition all slashdot users into believing that its a good thing they're going to start charging for a "premium" version of this site. The weird thing is, I LIKE the banner ads that are here. They pertain to my daily life. I'd rather just do donations to /., and am actually kind of surprised that there isn't a donations link (yes, I see the supporters link, but that's way too many clicks to spend my money) in main navigation.
Why did a free ecard site decide to go to a pay service when every other site has free ecards? I give Blue Mountain Arts three months to live out the dotcom death thrash. Fucked Company anyone?
Poor Piro,
.. you offer to give some snack that you *HATE* to a friend and thay are immediatly suspicious.
.. pimpin` for ca$h type of site.
.. my soul is torn. I Like fred & rodney's work, I want to see more of it, while I understand they have dead time [as all artists do] I still want to read more. I like the fact that I go to their site, and see .. their stuff .. thats it. But then I look at sites like Penny Arcade .. new stuff all the time .. and for a while there .. they were pimpin` like mad. Would I get my fix of MT more regularly if there were $$ in it for them ? [apparanty not, since piro is the art behind it .. and it would make him feel bad]
.. I prefer the swag method. Buy me a teddybear to support our site. [I personally have 2 megatokyo mugs on my desk here at work .. and the girl has a handful of t's to sleep in] They get a cut from caffe press, and the office/school publicity of having their image shown about - the user gets something that is hopefully not 2-sizes too small for them. [and definatly doent have darth vader on it]
/. might want to follow this model .. I would pay good $$ for a zippo with /. etched on it. [It goes without saying my coffee table would be sitting in style with a hardcover compelation of MT on it too.]
/.'ed .. pushing your bandwith costs into the sky .. what do you do ? *WHAT* do you do ?"
The same nervous guy who came to an anime convention and wasn't quite ready to believe the amount of people that showed up to see him.
He does have some points though.
I think he is dead on with how people think of 'value for dollar' its the same problem linux sometimes faces. The "Did-you-spit-on-that-or-something?-problem" that you see in 5th grade lunchrooms. [you know
And i definatly agree with his take on the whole banner-ad
but while i agree
Personally
Its already been mentioneed that
Question: "Your website is being
Answer : "I think of snow."
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
The idea of respect as currency in a post-shortage world was "discussed" (if not first introduced) in James P. Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear." In it he creates a space colony whose computers can create any material good imaginable. The result is that the colony's society has grown to treat a human's worth as how well they can perform the task they choose. A follow-up colony ship arrives at the colony and wacky hijinks ensue. Well, maybe just cultural turmoil.
Anyway, Piro seems to be making the case that the Web is the beginnings of this type of society, where ordinary people put things up for virtual mod points. After all, wouldn't each of us like to meet their Web heros? Linus? CmdrTaco? Scott Kurtz?
Careers should combine three things: what you can do, what you want to do, and what you can get paid for.
I think people used that arguement when cable TV was in its infancy.
Ummm..No. The draw for cable TV in its infancy was watching movies without commercials (HBO), and get more than the 3 broadcast networks (NBC, ABC, CBS). Cable TV offered value above and beyond broadcast TV that I lusted for but never attained as a child. (Now that I'm grown, I don't sit still long enough to watch TV 8*)
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
The hell with that. you're little ASCII heart was so cute.
English is not my native language. Because I know that many native English speaking people read and write on Slashdot, I would like to ask a question: Isn't that supposed to be spelled "your" instead of "you're"? Or is this really as interchangeable as reading English texts suggests?
What the author doesn't understand is "supply and demand" still rules economics. There was a huge burst of startups trying to find the money, and most simply didn't provide what people were willing to pay for...or worse, many startups thought they could make a fortune giving things away for free. Like any new technology/industry, a lot of people jump in at first, and those companies not economically viable get washed out - that doesn't mean that the whole industry is a loss.
There are plenty of
This is a new industry.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
By not accepting donations, (and by modifying his site so it incidentally supports his move toward being a commercial entity) he may be biting the hand that wants to feed him (but can't afford $20 t-shirts).
It seems fairly common, too, among websites that won't accept donations. They basically say: "I won't accept your $5, because that would be begging. Now, I desperately need money to keep this site up, so please buy this $20 t-shirt so I can get your $5." Oh well. At least it's better than, "Please click on my sponsor's ad even if you don't want their product, so we can get money out of them for nothing."
Why make people jump through hoops?
I think many of us would be willing to pay a certain amount for services we perceive as useful. However, I doubt the average user can afford to pay, say, $6 per month to each site they use.
I mean, I visit 4 sites regularly (daily basis) and probably around 5 sites once a week, and countless others whenever necessary. Using the Salon model, I would be paying $24 per month to access my favorite 4 sites. What about the other sites I visit? Do I need to pay full price just to access them once in awhile. Granted, their information is useful to me, but not $6/month useful. Now, I relize they all wouldn't charge $6, but I was just using that as an example of how the monthly cost for a few web sites can add up. I would imagine most of the big sites would charge around $3-$10 per month.
That brings us to the problem - many of the sites I visit (Salon, Britannica, etc.) want you to pay a flat monthly rate for premium access. I would be more likely to pay on my favorite sites you could have the option of paying-per-use.
I run a popular but financially struggling website (Vegan.com). Like most web publishers, I need to find ways to generate enough money to pay my hosting bills and get some compensation for all the work that goes into creating a quality site.
Piro makes a pretty good point that it's not money that drives the net, it's respect. But his article mainly looks at the dynamic of decisions made by webmasters.
I think it's more interesting to consider things from the perspective of the user.
The trouble with web publishing is that it encourages a leach mentality amongst readers. As a site owner, I wish my thousands of readers would use my Amazon.com links so that Vegan.com would have some decent revenue. But hardly anyone does, and Vegan.com makes practically no money. There's a part of me that feels disgusted that most people who visit my site every day do nothing to give back, although many undoubtedly shop on Amazon.
But when I surf the web, which I do for at least two hours a day, I notice my own leach tendencies.
I visit Slashdot every day, but I never order a thing from ThinkGeek. I used to read Salon.com every day, but there's no way I'm going to pony up $30 a year for their premium content. I used to send the occasional Blue Mountain card. But when they started imposing a service charge, I switched to Yahoo's greeting cards.
No matter how many sites start trying to charge, I know I'm always going to be able to surf the web and find interesting free content. So I don't pay for anything. Salon.com starts charging? No problem, I'll go to Slate.com. Although I'd prefer to read Salon's articles, there are plenty of other articles I can read for free that will provide nearly equal enjoyment.
This brings up what I see as the main problem confronting web publishers and their audience. Until the web came along, there were basically two ways to get goods and services in the real world. You could be an honest person and purchase them, or you could be a thief and steal them.
With the web, there's now a middle option: you can be a leach, taking whatever you are given for free, and offering nothing in return. When a site you like starts charging, you abandon it and move on to some other free site. It's totally legal. But is it moral?
For some reason, the way the web works encourages leach-like behavior. I've seen both sides of this. I've seen it in my own leach-like decisions in surfing the web, and I've seen it in the decisions made by the thousands of loyal but non-contributing visitors to my site.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
that during the .com boom, everyone raves "why .com works" and now everyone writes about "why .com doesn't work"?
I've read a few posts regarding banner ads and slahdot or other sites.... I've finally come to a revelation about banner ads.... of course I came to this conclusion a while ago, but have yet to say anything here:
Banner ads, the idea behind them, does work. The problem is that people have come to the decision that they will only pay for banner ads that are quantifiable... I.E. Click Throughs.
This is not, and should not be the case. Banner ads should be sold on the number or visits on a site, and the popularity of the site.
Just like advertisers want to be seen during superbowl.... Why? Many, many eyeballs. So their willing to pay a hefty price!
I don't see a comercial during the superbowl and go... "Whoa... I gotta have that!" and then leave to go to the store.... NO! I finish watching the superbowl and then at a later date, with the proverbial commercial seed planted in my brain, I go and purchase that product.
The same goes for banner ads. It's a form of advertisement. I'm not going to drop everything to go and head over to that site..... I'm here at slashdot or where-ever for a reason. I'll do what I have to, and then later.... When I'm not too busy.... I'll head over to thinkgeek and buy that hat.
Yes I purchased many a thing at ThinkGeek and elsewhere, because of banner-ads (I would not have known about them otherwise) but I have NEVER purchased anything by means of a click-through.
So in quantifiable means, the banner ad didn't work. There was a click through but no purchase.
Ah, but I did purchase. Just at a later date.
I can't stress this fact enough.... We do not drop everything when we see a tv ad and head to the store... we do it later. Does this mean because we didn't drop anything that TV ads are failing?
Time for a philosophy change.
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
I've been providing a service for two or three years now. I always had it be completely free (actually the web hosting costs me money). Once I started it out as being free, I didn't feel like I could have ever charged for it. At the height of the dot com silliness, perhaps I could have been making a thousand dollars a month or so for it, but it never would have felt right to me. Once my site stopped becoming my hobby and started becoming my job, the fun would leech out of it.
> I think people used that arguement when cable TV was in its infancy.
:)))
And that's exactly why cable TV failed in 95% of the countries
People will pay for information if something is added to it. People will still go to the movies for the big screen and big sounds, not to mention the fact you can go out and meet people. People will pay to see a band perform live because there is value in seeing something for yourself, and you get to hang out with other fans.
I always hear the phrase that "Information wants to be free." I would amend that to say information WILL be free. No one is gonna pay for something that they can get for free. The media threw around the term "information revolution" like it was just like the industrial revolution: something that would make a lot of people very rich. But they didn't realize that revolutions only benefit those that adapt quickly. Those that want to remain in the old regime soon find their necks in the guillotine.
I wouldn't invest a penny in any corporation that thinks its going to make money off information alone. You can sell information with hardware (like IBM) or sell information with support (like RedHat) but information alone will not make money.
i agree with his observation about people not wanting to pay for something that was once free, and this does help explain the failures of .coms. the strategy of "charging for what was once free" especially hurt the .coms because they applied it to resources that were non rivalrous and had close substitutes.
when one person sends an ecard, it doesn't make it any harder for another person to do the same. people don't have to compete for the privelege to send a card as the ecards don't run out. its hard to shell out money for something that you know is abundant.
second, because of the low cost of entry to the internet, there are close substitues to almost any site or service offered on the web. if all the sites in a once free category turn to a pay model, someone will start up another free version because they know they will get the users that the other sites abandoned.
this business model can work, but as we have all seen, it doesn't work on the internet.
Just because your site isn't making enough money doesn't mean people are merely leeches or thieves, and it's insulting to paint them as such (even vegan.com visitors).
Supply and demand rules. If there's a supply of free stuff, people aren't likely to pay for the same thing - that's not leeching, that just makes economic sense. Like broadcast TV, some sites find that giving away products provides an avenue for advertising (a very profitable activity when done right). There are a lot of ways of extracting money from pockets, and much of that involves knowing who your clients/customers REALLY are. You may not buy from ThinkGeek, but enough do to support SlashDot through advertising.
If people aren't giving you enough money to support your site, then that's YOUR problem for not balancing the supply-and-demand equation profitably - it does NOT mean your customers are the dregs of society.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
How do I make it so I can read the -1 comments, but not get bothered by the idiot who is intent on making the page more or less unreadable?
We'll find a number of worthy volunteers and fake a google subscription switch. It will be easy to fake using a browser plug in. Then we'll see exactly how many of those volunteers pull out their credit card. I'm betting it's about 1 in a 1000 depending on demographic.
How we know is more important than what we know.
How about linking to some of MY rants instead?
Even Salon has no business charging $6. _$6_? When someone can pay $10/month for their internet access, they're supposed to pay 60% of that to read a couple articles? And Salon doesn't even need dead trees. The problem is that they need that much from their subscribers because a lot of people won't take time to sign up for $1, maybe.
There's good news, though. Eventually, all things become more competitive. Once many sites are paid sites, you'll begin to see content aggregation solutions. You'll get Salon along with a hundred other sites for $10. You'll see a couple you love, a few you regularly pop into, and you'll then pay. The privacy concerns are going to be horrid, however. How do you centrally authenticate those page views without centrally tracking the user?
I have to disagree with most of the posts here suggesting Piro's rant is redundant with other commentary. I have read lots of articles on this topic, and most focus on the economics but really it comes down to psychology. The idea of giving away an intangible product, and then suddenly charging for it when you run out of startup money is not a well tested model. And he's right that in a user's mind, there's a dramatic change in the relationship between the user and the site/service. When Salon started charging for full articles, I stopped visiting and sadly, I did think a little less of them. Same with sites that start running pop-up ads all of a sudden.
:-)
Seems like a better solution would be for all the sites I view regularly to get together and say, look Paul, it costs us about $5 a month to serve all these sites to you. Would you be willing to pay this fee each month to keep us in business?
If one site did it I'd go somewhere else, but if they all did it, I'd go along with it.
BTW, I'm starting to really get sick of the "why is this news" posts. If you don't like it create your own slash site.
-Paul
"I'm nobody suspicious... That makes me sound even more suspicious, doesn't it?" - Spike (Cowboy Bebop)
You killed MegaTokyo!!
All I wanted to do was wake up this morning (late) and read my MegaTokyo. But NOooo, someone had to be trendy and make a frickin reference to MT on Slashdot!
Your
Dude,
cable TV was successful LONG before HBO, Cinimax, and Showtime.
Cable TV worked because it delivered a large number of static free TV channels.
There's two arguments as to why
As everyone knows now (at least, everyone should know by now), both of these arguments are flawed. As such
What about a larger customer base though? All the internet does is make it easier to trade - making it easier to trade doesn't mean you'll make more money, it means you'll get more and vigourous competition. Sure, people are resistant to paying for something they used to get for free, or at least for less, the car manafacturers have known this for years, but ultimately the problem is that for most of these services, it's so easy to enter the market that there's too much competition for anybody to make money, no one can run fast enough to keep ahead of everyone else. Sure, there are some highly innovative companies who can (for example, Google), but for the most part this is true.
Will
(I *really* want that THX sound system for a PC)
I'd be willing to kick in a few bucks to prop up Slashdot, but as long as they don't have those horrible X10 pr0n cam or casino pop-under ads, I'm pretty cool with them, all I ask is don't make them gaudy, i.e. flashing, I keep a few extra windows open on the desktop just to drop over those, ads like that could be giving away gold by the pound and I wouldn't notice, because my first reflex to anything flashing is to bury it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The real nice thing about the web is that everyone is a publisher and everyone is the audience. So the old model of the audience paying publishers doesn't work anymore.
Imagine that your hosting costs were reduced to zero. Would you still put up your web site? Would you if there were thousands of people who wanted to see it?
...richie - It is a good day to code.
(ignoring the recent 'stick figure dom' days while Piro was moving)
:-(
/. Effect, anyways.
<Sigh> I actually have a picture of the events of this strip's last panel. Also got a photo of Dom "attacking" one of Tsunami's (our fanzine) writers after waiting for him for a half hour by hiding under our table. I just haven't had the free time to get my Katsucon photos online.
Oh well, our meager bandwidth wouldn't survive the
It's not so much that the free sites are turning into pay sites... it's that the payments are MUCH TOO HIGH. All these guys want $11.95 a year, $4.95 a month, whatever... and many of them are for services I use only rarely.
I'd gladly pay a nickel to end an e-card. But $11.95 a year when I only send half a dozen of them? I can buy real greeting cards cheaper than that.
A few years ago, everybody was talking about micropayment schemes. And Paypal's initial blurb talked about how you could use Paypal to send $0.01 to each of twenty friends... they'd charge your credit card $5.00 for the first payment then draw down your $5 balance a penny at a time. These days, Paypal is doing everything possible to DISCOURAGE you from using credit cards as a payment source...
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
People who are not market analysts and who don't really understand the market at all seem to know so much about why the internet won't work. (Yes, I've been guilty of this as well, but in my hastily constructed defense I'll say that I'm a bit closer to it all than most people :)
The reason it's hard to compete on the internet is because it's a perfect market. Need web space? There's some guy who will sell it to you for $50 a month. Someone else will give you a fully redundent air-cooled super-backed-up buzzword compliant solution for $5000. Still others will give you the same thing for $3k, and others will give you slightly less for $2k, $1k, and $500, or perhaps $100 or $50. Ever looked around at just how many people provide webhosting?
When you have thousands of companies competing for business in a market that may only have 100k real customers you get to a saturation point where you can't lower your price anymore or you don't make money, but your competitor still is pricing his service $50 less. People got into price wars with each other and dropped prices until they went right out of business. Ethier they got scared and stopped dropping their price early (and thus lost customers to people who'd continue to drop their prices) or they dropped their price too low and couldn't make a profit.
This doesn't just apply to webhosting. Think about EBay, Yahoo Auctions, Amazon auctions, etc. Or Amazon books, borders.com, barnesandnoble.com, etc..
You have 8-10 different companies to choose from when making an online purchase, and these are just the large ones.. think about all the companies you can purchase computer gear from online? There is no way to compete unless you're selling an original product that can't be bought elsewhere.
These are some of the prime reasons that very large companies are going out of business right now. Think the Internet caused it or started it? No, obviously (Enron) there were other market problems as well. The phone companies were doing the same thing for the last few years.. "3 cents a minute.. no 2 cents a minute. Actually, we're paying you to use our service.."
It's stupid, and hopefully the mess will clean itself up.
Not all .coms got it wrong, just those like blue mtn that pulled a bait and switch. I agree at some level with the respect issue. I think you can integrate that with the making money model to create a successful .com, please indulge me for a few lines :)
1. Start web site with good, useful, intelligent/funny/something! content.
2. Get a customer base who likes it
3. Work up some sort of *Premium content*, that's the big thing. So perhaps it's exhaustive archives, with extras, and more insight, as well as other resources.
4. Provide this premium service at a price.
You still provide the basic functionality of the site that has built you a user base w/ respect. But now, those who truly respect you and value your content may buy your premium content if they want more.
IF you are going to go the Blue mtn. route you at least need to make it obvious from the get go that the service is only free for a certain time. You can never cut back on what you offer, that's just basic knowledge, but you can charge for an improved version.
-Adam
http://monkeyserver.com --- weeeeee
read the fucking Wednesday comic it's getting slashdotted.
Guess I'll read it tomorrow.
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
The problem all along has been the banner ad. It may be the single worst advertising medium ever invented. Banners are so bad that they themselves train people to ignore them. Click on a few banners and see what I mean, instant shit storm. Soon, you learn that clicking on banners is a drag. So the average user stops clicking.
Imagine that there is an interesting commercial on tv. When the TV decides you are interested in that commercial, it hits you with lots more and changes the channel to do it. Fuck that.
Online advertising quickly became a spam medium and nothing more. It killed itself through a gold-rush mentality, incompetence and a thorough misunderstanding of the Internet as a medium. Greed, stupidity and ignorance, if you will.
Someday, (hopefully soon) sombody will figure out how to do advertising properly and the game will change again. The HBO ads for Six Feet Under on Salon are an example that this may be happening already. Blue Mountain or Salon should be able to support themselves with advertising when advertising is done right. If advertising can support as bloated and inefficient an industry as the TV industry, there is no reason it can't support the Internet content industry.
The dot-com thing went bust for the same reason pyramid schemes go bust, and for the same reason the stock market can't (in the long run) go up faster than the economy grows. Wealth isn't a bunch of bits in your bank's Oracle database. Wealth is real stuff. That might include services, but ultimately, you can't have more services than you have people to provide the services.
Dot-com is the future of all commerce, but you can't have more commerce than you have stuff, and it was quite clear to any rational human that the top dozen dot-coms would have needed to do almost ALL of the commerce in the world to justify their stock prices. Some day this will happen, unless we stop it -- consider how much of commerce is already completely in the hands of Wal-mart and Manpower -- but it couldn't happen overnight.
As to charging for what once was free, as everybody has known for at least 5 years, the real key is to have a workable system for charging very small amounts of money. The problem is not that people won't pay money to send ecards; the problem is that people won't pay more than 25 cents to send an ecard, and we don't have any system in place that doesn't cost more than that just to process a payment! It doesn't actually seem insurmountable to me, but I'm just a lowly developer.
And let the angel whom thou still hast serv'd tell thee ...
I am NOT Jon Katz.
Unless there's an equally slick and well packaged alternative available for free exactly one click away. Been on the 'net recently? It simply doesn't map well to any other model or analogy: there's a very low cost of entry for suppliers, no expectation of payment by consumers, and it's a transparent market, so you can't obfuscate your charges like long distance phone companies do. ;-)
The only analogy that springs to mind is a huge and ongoing flea market, in one massive field, with free admission for everyone. Unless you are the only seller with shinola, and everyone else is selling shit, you can't charge, because your customers will just wander off. Hell, even if you are the only one selling genuine shinola, there's so many other stalls giving away "shinola-like" products that your customers might just wander off and never find their way back.
What's my solution? Give up trying to make money on the 'net, stupid. But hell, as long as greedy and ignorant venture capitalists are prepared to throw good money after bad in wonderful follies like Slashdot, I'm happy to go to their stall. When it bows to the inevitable and shuts up shop (or starts charging, which is effectively the same), there will still be plenty of other equally daft vendors opening up free stalls. And if there isn't, well, I was never paying anything, so I haven't lost anything, other than my investment in whoring karma.
People who say that we should expect to pay to support sites like Slashdot are rather missing the point. The whole model of commercial sites is doomed, unless they're genuine retaillers like Amazon. High quality non-retail sites are simply fuckedcompanies from the get-go, and the sooner we all admit that (quietely), the sooner we can get back to lapping up the benefits of spending money from rich, greedy, ignorant venture capitalists, and enjoying the lovely short lived ride. It's going to be over soon, and you and I (if we're being honest) just aren't going to pay for another go on it.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The only thing worse than Jon Katz is Piro.
Anyway - there was an internet boom BECAUSE of the stock market. The new technology that became available to a new market played a big part, but it all happened because of the stock market. Investors saw an opportunity to get in on the ground floor (ie. buy low) of a company in a new marketplace that had a potential of becoming "the next Microsoft" - in other words, a monopoly. Everyone thought Netscape was going to be the next Microsoft. Then Yahoo. Then Ebay. Then Amazon. Then Macromedia. Then Real. The money flowed into these companies, and they bought equipment, and people, and that sparked investment in the more sensible computer and software companies. The business model was: get dominant marketshare by dumping the product for free, then when the competition was murdered, charge em up the nose for the service because you're the only game in town. In the interim, revenue was stopgapped by ads. But in the long run, when it appeared that the only "next Microsoft" that would appear was. . . Microsoft, I think it became pretty obvious to a lot of people that internet stocks were overinflated.
As the internet content became more saturated with ads, and more vertical to corporate interests, and more eyeballs got funnelled to less and less sources - it all became less and less compelling for the vast majority of net newcomers. You and I, the DSL subscribers, the tech workers, the geeks, didn't really notice much of a change, other than - our nongeek brother in law who used to email us every day, now has discontinued his AOL account because he can't download free music on Napster anymore, or all the cool little independent sites had shut down because they couldn't afford to stay up anymore. This was all secondary to the cessation of flow of investment dollars as all the loans based on them started coming due. THAT is why the dotcom boom went bust. The content issue was merely a side effect.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
So let's see the website operators, portals, etc., start coming up with services offer value above and beyond the free Internet, just like HBO, MTV, and other pioneering cable channels.
Just like there is no spoon...
megatokyo supports itself on ad revenue and merchandise. penny arcade adds donations and gives people who subscribe a little gift (or they used to...i think they've changed recently). but there's never been one day where you just suddenly connected and surprise! the site's pay, as what happened to piro to spark his rant in the first place. how many people do you know who kept their premium cable channels after the first 3 months free were over? i don't think i know anyone who did. and at least with that, you knew when the free period would run out.
i think piro's right. respect is the currency of the net, and when you start charging for something that before you just traded for fun or whatever, people lose their respect for you. it's the little extras that you provide once people fork over however much cash they can that keeps the respect (for instance, penny arcade never demanded a minimum donation). piro's point was that people will put stuff on the net in return for having gotten stuff themselves. we'll either add cash, or we'll increase the content out there. but presumptuously demanding payments for content won't work.
I'd be far more impressed had he posted that rant in late 1999/early 2000. You know, a few months before the big Nasdaq dump rather than almost 2 years after.
Hindsight is easy.
Now, others notice the sucess of this and begin to set up some more stands around. Not only does that begin to entice others into coming out and gettin lemonade... but it becomes rather trendy as well. Soon you have regular big refreshment stores and convenience stores 'dressing down' to look like simply curbside lemonade stands. Fancy awnings come off and warped, nail laden 2x4's go up. Backlit signs go in favor of paper looking signs only lit by inconspicous lanterns aimed at them.
It is a great time to serve lemonade, but competition being what it is, one must strive harder to get business. After it is established that ALL the stands can be easily reached, then other methods must stand out, like price and quality. So, many will spice up their lemonade's taste, while offering lower price (or just more extremes of each side), even attempting to set up niches for yuppies and other brainless sheep to mindlessly gravitate towards because it is 'hip and cool'. However, people are fickle, and what most dont understand is that if it is so easy to create a fab, then it is only logical that it is just as easy for it to go away.... if only because it will be replaced by yet another fad that quickly catches on.
Soon, even price and quality will begin to be duplicated so much that stands have little to no real uniqueness in identity and/or product. Then service of course comes into play, in which the customer is treated well after he buys his lemonade, is helped if it is bad and potential customers are offered complete 'one stop shop' information that means they don't have to spend extra time searching all over for information on what types of lemons are best for what kind of food, etc.
Now, fast forward a year, after this has been going on and many foolishly consider it mature. What will soon happen is that the non stop influx of new lemonade stands will be going into a market that is both saturated from a supply/demand standpoint as well as a market that is waining in basic support because it is no longer 'the next new thing'. Everyday, less and less SUV's have 'lemonade is best grade' bumper stickers, while even the 'non conforming conformists' that say 'down with corporate lemonade' are as usual not willing to back up rhetoric with action. How is any lemonade stand going to survive in this? Well, there will be an amorpheus gobbling up of all the little stands into several really big chains or stands. However, that means choice is gone and quality will take a nose dive while price skyrockets. Soon, it will no longer be a shop of 2 lemonade makers and one seller who also maintains the shack and does the footwork for helping customers... rather it will be one brainless salesman, 3 brainless mixers (but of only ONE part of a whole system each), one supply/stocking person, one hammerer, one sweeper, one nail provider, and of course we get to... one supervisor for each major area, sales, maintenance, mixing, customer service, analysis of lemonade liking. One assistant manager over every 2 of these, along with a store manager, assistant manager, secretary, market analysis liason, his secretary, receptionist, broom, hammer and nail order manager and his secretary, along with a staff of 4 HR for hiring and payroll with 3 managers for that and one HR chief manager, then an Executive officer and his secretary and assistant with the assistant's secretary. Don't forget the business development team too... with managers and all, they number 25. Then there is administrators for the phone, electric, etc... and their managers that add up to 15.
Now if things begin to go sour (yes it WAS intended), then layoffs will happen. First all the mixers will be layed off, then the sales and customer service. Next the maintenance crew is gone, etc, until only the management and execs are left scratching their heads like a confused monkey wondering why they have no customers now and their 'solutions' didn't work!
> What /. needs is a "Nani Naze /." page...
I can see it now--Cmdr. Taco gets the little boy overalls and CowboyNeal gets the rabbit suit...
Chris Mattern
So far, the largest dot com I've seen that's been able to pull it off to moderate success has been IGN.com. They spent years building up a large fan base, and after the internet economy collapsed they begin to offer IGNinsider accounts for 25 bucks a year, with additional articles, a printable mag, and other various extras. While there was enormous uproar of people who wanted to keep the internet free(as in beer) they've actually been doing pretty well, and are slowly pulling other content under the premium veil, most recently the popular message boards, and attempting to lure more people in.
Regardless of whether IGN survives, I'd expect many sites with an article/review oriented aspect to do the same thing that IGN did in the coming months/years. As for those that offered a free service that was essentially pretty pointless like this Blue Mtn. company did, you can give people something that don't really need, but you can't get them to buy something they don't really need.
>> I think people used that arguement when cable TV was in its infancy.
> Ummm..No. The draw for cable TV in its infancy was watching movies without commercials (HBO), and get more than the 3 broadcast networks (NBC, ABC, CBS). Cable TV offered value above and beyond broadcast TV that I lusted for but never attained as a child. (Now that I'm grown, I don't sit still long enough to watch TV 8*)
And note that Pay TV was never given away (except as part of a clearly marked promotionals). That's Piro's main point: giving it away to build up an audience doesn't work because you get massive backlash when you try to introduce mandatory payment, expecially if you didn't give people signing up for free any warning that they might have to pay to keep getting it later on.
Chris Mattern
I thought clients sent in payments in exchange for services rendered. Funny, I don't remember receiving any payments.
>Just because your site isn't making enough money doesn't mean people are merely leeches or thieves, and>it's insulting to paint them as such (even vegan.com visitors).
I feel as if you've put words in my mouth here. I'm grateful for the thousands of visitors my site gets. But that doesn't mean that they are offering any financial support to the website.
What I tried to do in my last post is to show a dynamic that I think is at work, by which people who regularly visit a website seldom choose to provide financial support. And to do this, I pointed the finger not at my readers, but at my own web surfing habits.
>There are a lot of ways of extracting money from pockets,>and much of that involves knowing who your clients/customers REALLY are.
>You may not buy from ThinkGeek,
>but enough do to support SlashDot through advertising.
Would you care to back that up with some documentation? Virtually every content oriented site struggles. And I bet Slashdot is not paying its bills thanks to ThinkGeek. I think their funding sources during the dotcom craze have everything to do with what's keeping the site around today. I bet Slashdot's making next to no profit--if it's making any profit at all.
You're undoubtedly right that I could make more money with my website by paying closer attention to my customers. But I pay very close attention already, and thankfully have other business opportunities that have nothing to do with the web. Yes, you can make money off the web as a content provider, but it's incredibly difficult compared to just about any other business opportunity out there in the world. I tried to explain why this is true, but you seemed to take what I had to say as an attack on my readers.
I'm generally "Interesting," "Insightful," and even "Funny" here. What the hell happens to me at parties?
Information / data is not a "Good or service". While creating / organizing data is, once that's done, the info is different. Info can be freely copied, with minimal resources.
/shall thrive, ordering info (via pay as you read systems, with no sharing allowed) means society no longer values spreading info more than controlling money.
People have been "leeching" info forever. "Did you hear the one about..." The transport methods and amount available changed. The public library started the mass revolution of getting info for free. No more need to pay for the newspaper to read it. The reason libraries were encouraged, and considered a good thing for a moral society? Because "leeching" info gave something MUCH more valuable, an educated society.
While mail ordering products via the web should
So how should info creators be compensated? Partly by joy of creation and earning. Maybe partly by those willing to pay for conveinience of quick and easy delivery? Maybe by donations? I don't know of any sure and fair way, but know that I'll continue to proudly "leech" information in my desire to further my understanding and appreciation of this world, even if the only free info sources are my local storytellers.
-Howard Abbey
But Piro is an angsty pedophile. He needs a serious whuppin'. The only credit I'll ever give him is that he can draw well. Largo + Dom are cool. Stick figure dom is GREAT. The comics that Largo writes with L33t and gaming are great. But the main story line with piro and his angst suck. I wouldn't listen to a word that man says. You trust a man about internet issues when his talent is drawing sad high school girls in snow? Gimme a break.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I liked the read, it was interesting and thought provoking. Right or wrong (to me) isn't important, because now we have a discussion to help us sort that out.
.com-ers think the content itself is the product, and for a few it is. But what if the content is not the product, but the message? Ask me to pay for a message, and I won't. Give me a product that I value, and I might. But use the content to encourage me to buy a tangible good, and there's one revenue stream (and I'm sure there are others).
What happened here? He wrote a piece, it got somebody's attention, and now he's getting traffic. Some of us are going to bookmark his link and go back for his content, not his comments.
Attention is the currency of the web; it is limited (we have only a certain amount of time to surf in a day) which makes it valuable (scarcity of goods).
What you do with that "currency" is your business (literally). Find a real-world product to generate revenue is one way (sell me a t-shirt, etc). That's pure advertising, plain and simple.
Some
It's no different from TV, newpaper, magazine or (the best of all) word of mouth and cachet. You've got my attention, what do you do with it? Ask me to click on a banner? Dumb idea. I hate ads, advertising, and the weasel language that goes with it. It's not exactly SPAM, but it uses the same business model.
He uses the greeting card (Blue Mountain) example in his rant. Blue Mountain's mistake is thinking their product is virtual greeting cards. It's not. (If someone can't make up a greeting card and eMail it, well they probably don't belong at a desktop). The product is more akin to the FTD flower business. What could BM have done, what real tangible good or service could they have offered me? That's for them to figure out, but charging for online cards simply eliminates a bunch of captive eyes that they actually already had (and paid for). If we agree that the currency of the web is attention, their stock just went down.
This business isn't easy; free enterprise isn't supposed to be. Losers always outweigh winners, and that won't change, whether you're a dot-com or Burma Shave. Everybody's got to figure it out for themselves, and the hardest part (apparently) is:
a) knowing who your customers are,
b) what you're offering them, and
c) whether they can get it elsewhere.
There seem to be a lot of dot-coms who somehow have convinced themselves the answer to c) is "no".There very well may be cases where it's true, but not nearly as often as some web firms seem to think it is. And if you're wrong on that, it's pretty much a given you won't get a) and b) right either.
As an owner of a dot com business (or rather a .net if you will) I would like to state for the record that the news of my death has been greatly exaggerated.
-- Solaris Central - http://w
And I LIKE google.
Trouble is the cost factor is a curve. say 40% would pay more than $5 a month for google....that means 60% won't. 20% might pay as high as $10 a month for google, while 10% won't pay anything at all.
Value isn't an absolute - it's relative to the payer. (See StarShip Troopers for a full explaination).
cough...I agree with the article - the problem is that people are applying the traditional money generation model to the internet - pay to play. However, the problem is that when users of the internet aren't 'used' to this concept (and generally resent it).
A better solution is to find a different model - (personally I like the idea of sponsors - like NASCAR - rather than straight advertising...but that's just me.)
I'm sick and tired of everyone trying to charge me $x a month. I don't care if it's $5 a month or $50, it all adds up. And I think we all know that $5 a month will soon be $5 plus $1 misc fees, then $6 plus $1.25, etc... It never ends. It's not my problem if you went public without a plan on how you were going to grow your revenues 12% year to please stockholders. Maybe it's time for dot coms to realize and accept that maybe they are NEVER going to get rich doing what they are doing and that information SHOULD be free. I'm certainly never going to pay you for something I can get for free someplace else. If I can't then there's an opportunity! All your now ex-users will be looking for someplace else to go. I'll gladly clone the idea of your site minus the flaws. If I can at least supplement my income with the advertising revenue it generates that's enough for me!
I too have noted the tendency for some sites to switch to a pay model. I however, agree with the idea to an extent. The trade-off is though, if I'm paying for site content, I want the ability to set preferences for content displayed. I want the ability to have an effective suggestions forum. I want to be free from banner ads. I want comprehensive information. I want a site to coddle me. I want my money's worth.
Blue Mountain won't see my patronage (and I dont think it ever had anyway).. simply because if I'm going to pay money for a card, I might as well go that extra few steps, and send a real card. Afterall, the increased cost of that paper card, shows in some degree, an increased effort and meaning. Sadly enough, atleast here in the States, society has grown increasingly more materialistic.. and a paper card, costing more, carries more "value" than an e-card, of the exact same thing.
as for the whole bait and switch concept...to quote a popular tv commercial.."What just happened here Davey?"
"We got hosed Tommy, we got hosed..."
fish
creativity is the art of concealing your sources
for Piro to get some more rest as the server is gonna be going a lot slower now due to ./ :) Too bad for the MT fans tho since now we'll have to wait even longer for the update on thurs. :/
The problem with most of the dot-coms was not so much their business models as was there INSANE SPENDING. VC's pumped millions upon millions of dollars into these companies and what did they spend it on? Foos ball tables, $1500 aeron chairs, and multimillion dollar headquarters.
The other problem was their compulsion to try to grow from zero to microsoft in two years and then have a huge IPO. You will find that most of the surviving dot coms are those that resisted that temptation.
It just once again shows that the axiom "slow and steady wins the race" is still true today inspite of all our technology.
Eric S. Raymond (http://www.tuxedo.org), the guy the media was getting quotes from back in the hype days has been telling a well developed version of this for some time. For example, he presented it at a talk to the MITRE Corperation in Feb of 1999. It can also be found in his writings:
g /h omesteading/
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/writings/homesteadin
Damn! Sent to Troll Hell without even a single reply. Yeah, that's a good way to prove me wrong.
What a waste of my time...
I think people used that arguement when cable TV was in its infancy.
The cable company charges you a fixed price, which goes to pay not just the cable network and infrastructure necessary to deliver NTSC to the back of your tube. Part of that money also gets kicked over to the program producers (in the form of syndication fees, showing rentals, etc.), plus channels and producers sell commercials based on cable viewership.
This model doesn't translate to the internet's current model. To adjust it to fit means your ISP would charge you more, and pay fractional pennies per hit to the websites you view.
Darwinism would soon take over, imo. Sites that are interesting, compelling, or have just sheer gravity due to mass interest would receive dollars in exchange for serving their content to visitors.
This has been proposed many times, but I doubt it's going to happen, because there's enough freebie/donated/volunteer websites filling many peoples' needs. That, or sites that survive otherwise are supported by their
product or service.
Big Daddy, Johnny, Burp, Aunt Zelda, Scott, Slurp, Big Momma
What's my solution? Give up trying to make money on the 'net, stupid.
Another solution is to only offer stuff for free that will always be free, and then introduce new pay side of the site with additional features. I agree that moving a free service to a pay service is suicide. But if you only add new pay services, well that's different.
A good example of this approach is site. The originally offered a basic site with the show streamed over the net. (But only at the same time it was on the radio.) The expanded site that costs bucks gives you access to an archive of shows and a ton of special features. They didn't lose anyone when they launched the expanded site because they didn't remove a thing from the original.
Note to slashdot. If you need to start charging then only charge for some new cool features that people want. Just getting the site without ad's wont cut it. I wouldn't pay for it.
What makes you think paid sites will not offer better and greater stuff that you value, so that the price is ok? I think people will pay what they value, if it sells for a pair price AND (BIG AND) you can't pirate it. People like pirating, they don't give a damn about company A or B (in general). They know they aren't the ones making the world so unfair so "fix the world first, then judge me". It's my impression, i in no way would endorse piracy. In fact, i think piracy does not always harm company A but in fact may help it kill company B (ex: if MS Office couldn't be pirated, it would have been used less, and some other companies would have had an income).
unfinished: (adj.)
Cable TV is much like Access to the Net. :)
Not the content, stupid
Megatokyo RULES.
Q SUCKS, he is my FOE
Considering that cable's been around longer than HBO and such, I don't think that was the motivation behind setting up the first cable systems. I thought it was more about being able to supply a better signal than you would be able to get yourself...the cable company would set up several antennas in a central location, each aimed at a different transmitting tower, and put the received signals out on its own network. It saved you the fuss of making sure your antenna was pointed in the right direction and could sometimes snag extra channels that you couldn't reliably pull in on your own. (The "CA" in "CATV" means "community antenna," not "cable.") It also made subscription-based TV possible, but that didn't happen until later.
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
On a slightly related note, my Sunday newspaper included a paper advertisement for Amazon.com. I found it interesting that Amazon, the "first" big "online-only" retailer was paying for paper ads in the newspaper.
Go figure ...
Actually not at all.. I would say I download quite a bit of mp3s. However, I do not do it because I feel "l33t". There are quite a few people like me. I listen to music from overseas (I live in the US), particularly Hong Kong. However, since Chicago does not have as big a Chinese population as say, San Francisco or Toronto, people that sell cds here don't do too well. You either pay 25-30 dollars for a cd. If they had cds here for regular price, I would buy it. Heck, whenever I go back to Hong Kong I will buy regular cds (NOT Pirated mind you). I think that mp3 sharing is a god send for people like us.
The problem with the analogy to cable was that there really was never any competition between providers in the cable tv space. People were presented with the option to either get cable or not.
The internet is much more granular. If websites start coming up with a "value add" subscription service, people will be forced to choose which subscription services to subscribe to. The problem here is that people hate being nickeled and dimed. If there was an option where people could pay a blanket subscription fee and have access to a whole family of website's "value add" sections, they might choose it. But for an individual website to start charging, is going to be a difficult proposition.
Unfortunately, there are already content providers doing this type of umbrella service. So anyone who tries to setup this kind of website network will have to compete with the AOL's and MSN's of the world...not exactly lightweight competitors.
"Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos!"
Aa, Piro-san. "iCard" o katte koto ga arimasu ka? Muryouno desu! (http://www.apple.com/icards)
--invalidname
TRANSLATION: Piro, have you ever created [written] an iCard? It's free!
Great idea! too bad it probably wont fly. You have to remember that if the referral gets "Lost" Amazon gets to keep that 50 cents. And 50 cents more a transaction is probably 50% of the profit margin. So they are never going to willingly give away 50% of their profit by giving you a list of people to give referrals to.
The home of the 3D Socialization and Interaction Engine
This article hits on a number of issues I've had to deal with lately. My website is frequently getting 3000 visitors a day and on occasion reaches 10,000 daily visits. This is creeping close to the limits of my bandwidth. Since I support this completely out of pocket, its slowly starting to dawn on me that I really should at least ATTEMPT to gain some revenue through the website, even if it only pays for the bandwidth.
However, I am steadfastly opposed to traditional methods of obtaining revenue. Banner ads are a no brainer. I simply don't want them. Not only do they consume valuable screen realestate, many people block them anyways, and the rest ignore them. They pay a pittance in any case. Why annoy people for nothing.
Charging for access to the site simply isn't an option. As fun as it might be, nobody's going to pay for it. If some of the future projects of mine get finished, I might be able to charge subscriptions for some type of priority access, but I can't imagine offering anything that wouldn't be accessible freely to the general public.
Affiliate programs make for a nice, non intrusive option. But I feel like promoting products I have no interest in, as it goes against the theme of the site. And even if I DO support products that are in line with the message of inspiratation I attempt to convey, the companies that sell some of those products haven't exactly advertised in such a way that promotes good will. Anyone NOT seen an semi-lewd X10 ad lately?
The best option I have come up with is to manufacture or assemble my own products and sell them myself, and support the site and maybe myself through profits on those sales. Nobody will be compelled to buy them, but at least they will represent what I'm trying to accomplish. But before I can do that, I need to produce them in a more professional manner and with a higher quality than I do for the demonstration purposes.
The point I'm trying to make is, if I continue to gain in popularity, I'm going to need to find some way to make money to survive. But I don't want to lose respect in the process either. The day I start bringing in revenue should be a day of rejoince for my visitors because they realize it will bring about more fun toys to play with over the internet, not dismay because of greater restrictions.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
...cartoon piro != real piro. When some people on the forums kept on talking about the possibility of (cartoon) him shacking up with the underage chick, he got real, real pissed and almost shut the forum down.
when i say megatokyo, i think of Bubblegum Crisis, the original 80's cyberpunk anime series with babes in hardsuits.
I dont think of the web comic.
(even tho my mega-tokyo.com has nothing much to do with BGC....)
no sig for you
Comic artist Scott McCloud, author of Reinventing Comics, has voiced his own opinions on this issue in a series of online comics.
Part 1
Part 2
The original attraction of cable was to be able to watch near-first-run and "R" rated movies at home, at all! This was back in the 70s, before VCRs! The first cable movie channel I'm aware of was the "Z" channel, around '75 or '76. It was a pretty big deal to sneak over to someone's house when their parents weren't home, to watch an "R" rated movie like "Rocky."
I agree with you, but I was trying to avoid saying that because I didn't want to get flamed with "They have every right to charge what they want for *their* content" and "If you don't like it, don't use it" comments. I think $6 a month for one site is rediculous too.
I'm with you, this site seems to me to be a sorry juvenile self-congratulatory asian-fetishistic pile of crap.
bullshit... heh.
Insisting on calling piracy theft is just as stupid as insisting on it being called copyright infringement.
I'll tell why cable took off, porn.
When ON tv came out I believe the first cable company, it had a box that sat on your tv, if you wanted to watch the movie the where playing, you turned the big knob to ON tv.
I was about 13 when we got this, the first time I turned it on and watched the pretty lady wrap her lips around some guys unit, I was hooked.
Then cable channels started arriving, the big selling point NO censorship.That change pretty quickly, but for a while is was a boys wet dream, literally...
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I may hate RealNetworks, but i think their 'RealOne' idea is going to be the future for making money on the net.
.NET required a relativly cheap subscription it would become much more attrative.
The way it works is you have a flat monthly subscription fee, you get a player (RealOne player) and access to a there partner network. Already i've come acrose clips of video where i needed to subscribe to RealOne to be able to view, if 80% of the video clips on the
Consequently, the porn industry has been doing this successfuly for years now, and as they say; when looking for new ways to expliot media, look at what comes out of porn.
-Jon
this is my sig.
Unlike before, the sending of cards are now a significant part of the product.
The original business model for BMA actually was hard e-commerce. The free e-cards were the loss leader to generate traffic. The bet was that a small percentage of the millions of users would attach high-margin gifts to the cards. The owner of BMA started an online flower company, worked with a chocolate company, and started a gift certificate service. BMA was going to go public based on revenue derived from the hard e-commerce sites. For its huge success, the site was also cheap to run. It had stable paper card revenue to support it (much like Hallmark an American Greetings funded their sites).
Several companies looked at BMA, and Excite@Home won the opportunity to buy it, offering $800m of funny-money and $350m cash based on their perceived value of BMA being able to boost their Internet reach and indirectly boost Excite's advertising revenues. Soon after Excite bought BMA, Excite tried pimping the site out to ordinary advertisers, but the floor suddenly fell out of the Internet advertising business. While BMA wasn't losing as much as competitors, they weren't necessarily profitable either. Yahoo, DoubleClick, Excite and others were hit incredibly hard in the advertising fallout. Egreetings went bankrupt, and Hallmark and American Greetings were leaking money at a pace of $25m-$35m per quarter. It was becoming obvious that the $1b investment wasn't ever going to materialize for Excite. The founders of BMA, though, were quite a success story.
With Excite on its way to backruptcy, American Greetings snatched up BMA for pennies on the dollar ($35m?) and then instituted a pay-to-send model. Less traffic from non-paying customers reduces operating expenses (especially on peak holidays), and the cards the users send are now linked to real money. The cards are now the product to their paying users. There are still some free cards available, though, and one can still see ads and attach gifts on the free cards.
Is BMA a failure? No. It's been the best-run and most efficient greeting card site. It's high-flying glory days are over, though. The flaw is in the gamble of those who paid an absurd amount of money for something not proven to be able to have a return on its investment.
The users who pay BMA yearly are the ones who send e-cards frequently. The last-minute Valentine's Day lusers will go elsewhere and help another free greeting card site lose their money faster.
How many people using Slashdot would pay for it if they had to? I would. Along with Google and MyYahoo, SlashDot is one of the few sites I enjoy regularly. Would I pay for cnn.com or pogo.com? No, becasue I don't use them frequently. Others might.
Just like there's basic cable and extended cable, Internet content sites can be lumped together to colectively provide service to paying customers. Zillions pay $9/month or more to AOL. They may not appreciate all of the services, but their money helps fund them, even the greeting cards.
- ez
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
And I thought I was one of the only ones who felt this way. This is actually the biggest reason why I miss Napster. I listen to a lot of Japanese music and when I heard a really cool song I wanted to download it, because theres no way I'll find it sold locally and getting it shipped from overseas is iffy.
Here's my DeCSS mirror, where's yours?
"The draw for cable TV in its infancy was watching movies without commercials (HBO), and get more than the 3 broadcast networks (NBC, ABC, CBS). Cable TV offered value above and beyond broadcast TV that I lusted for but never attained as a child. (Now that I'm grown, I don't sit still long enough to watch TV 8*)"
Actually the draw for cable TV in its infancy was to simply get broadcast television to areas that couldn't get television.
This happened in the 50's, not the 70's as you seem to imply.
I should know, I grew up in a town in Pennsylvania that was one of the first to get cable TV.
There were 3 (count 'em) channels, and at some point I remember "educational TV" being put on. I think it was a forerunner of PBS. Later, they expanded the dial to fill up VHF positions 2-13. And it was that way until the mid-80's.
Its funny to think the "scrambling" employed by cable companies for HBO when it came out was to pick a frequency in between 6 & 7 where most tuners couldn't tune (remember, this was the analog days). Depending on your TV, you could simply fine tune channel 6 until you got HBO, or there were home-brew hacks to your tuner that people swore would work. I don't know, my parents would never let me experiment with the color TV.
The point is that cable TV was expensive in those days ($10/month. Holy cow...this was when a brand new car was $3,000), but if you wanted TV you paid for cable.
But believe me, the commercials were there.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
And hey, this is exactly what we get when we buy cable tv -- especially digital cable or satellite with their umpteen billion channels. I have like 200 channels on my digital cable. It's insane. I barely watch any of them, let alone all of them -- but its easy enough to offer the whole package. Obviously, there's a slight distribution difference with cable TV vs the net, but not a big one, you're just peer to peer with their web server with IP, instead of paying a provider for a feed and being forced to watch a subset of what they choose to provide. Imagine if cable could carry 2^32 channels ;)
If you want to support MegaTokyo, buy some stuff from the MegaTokyo store. You get cool swag, Piro and Largo get some cash to help run MegaTokyo, and we're all happy!
And this is the model that I think will pay off solid in the long run. Forget donations, people aren't that generous. You offer the content for free, and then sell real hard items based on that content. It's kinda like popular TV shows.. They're popular because a lot of people watch them, but once it becomes popular enough, people want to pay to advertise for you. They want t-shirts with "the truth is out there" on them.. Things like that.
The problem with this model is that currently, you have to be an uber-geek to walk around with a t-shirt advertising a website on it. So the content has to be *extremely* popular to hit critical mass on this type of operation. As the web becomes more of a mainstream medium (it's still not as pervasive as TV, say) this will start to occur more and more.
The real big winners out of this model: sites that make custom swag and perhaps offer storefronts to sell that swag at.
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
I think a lot of posts here are missing the point of the rant. Perhaps my perception is skewed by having read Piro's previous rants about covering the site's costs; I've already got the background story to understand what he means. Let me both clarify and expand, if I may.
We buy products because we like them, or we at least think we do. But, when we dislike the seller, we tend to project that dislike onto the product as well. Because we can financially hurt the seller through the product and capital used to sell it, it becomes the seller to us, in a way. By boycotting or destroying stores/merchandise we strike out at the seller by proxy. Animal rights activists douse furs in red paint, some people use Linux/AMD machines because they percieve a Wintel monopoly, etc... There can come a point where the product itself ceases to matter so much as who is selling it.
This, I think Piro argues, and I would as well, relates to what happened to many web sites that switched from free site to paysite. Especially those sites that did so unexpectedly or on short order. People, rightly or wrongly, expected something that was free to continue to be so. If it suddenly comes at a price, with no added value for that price, people feel that something they once had was taken from them. It's not a matter of business on the internet in particular, or even of people being cheapskates. It's a matter of human psychology.
Now, if I think someone took something from me, I'm going to dislike them. And if I project that dislike onto the product they sell, I'm less likely to buy it. If there are a lot of people like me, the product fails to sell and the seller goes under. QED.
That said, the "swag model" a'la MT dodges this particular problem. They charge to cover their costs, but rather than taking something away they add value through sweet spinoff merchandise. The original free content reamins free, so long as the swag sells. (Please sell, swag. Sell like mad.) Penny Arcade is doing something similar with "Club PA" where donators get something extra. (http://www.penny-arcade.com/) These apporaches avoid the psychological pitfalls. In fact, their rants on the topic (in both PA and MT) may even play on psychology by humanizing the authors and engendering favorable feelings (which might also transfer onto the product).
And if the MT swag and book does not sell well enough and the site dies, I will sit in a snowbank and cry.
But why do people visit Dell's web site? Because over the years Dell has built up a reputation as a manufacturer of good quality computers. They are a respected computer manufacturer. Respect cannot be directly bought for money, but a business can build it up through wise application of money. (Building quality products, good customer service, etc.) It can also loose that respect overnight with a few bad management decisions. ("Nobody will notice if we cut a few corners in quality to save money...")
Respect in the business community is considered valuable; it is known as an intangible, usually called customer goodwill. When buying or selling a business, it is considered an asset of the company, even though you can't touch it or measure it. You can even litigate over actions that cost a company goodwill.
My point? Businesses can't just go out and buy respect/reputation/goodwill, they have to earn it, and it is considered valuable. People wouldn't bother to visit Dell's website if Dell didn't have a reputation built up over the years. Without that reputation, they'd just be ABC Computers, and who would care?
---dragoness
It's when you start charging for specific content that the analogy breaks down. Only a handful of "premium" television channels charge for access specifically to their own content. They have the advantage of being the only options offered by your local cable provider. However, as Piro reminded us, all websites are equally accessible. There is no HBO or Showtime of the web, by which I mean sites that provide content that is in demand but unavailable anywhere else to the extent that people would happily start paying even though they are used to getting it free.
The only business model that's been successful in this regard has been porn. Why? Because the web is the safest, most anonymous way to access it. With normal movies or magazines, nobody's embarrassed to buy them from the store, so the Web is competing with traditional media for customers. With porn, anybody can access XXX content from the privacy of their own home, and they are often willing to pay $20-$30 a month for that luxury. Until the web can provide content across the board that is of comparable quality AND easier to access than traditional media, they won't find as many paying customers as they dream of having.
I wish that my inferiority complex were as good as yours.
-RenderHead
Musicians should make their money from concerts not records. That's what was feeding them before recordings were ever invented. They just used records as a way to go from a profession to an industry. If it costs 33 cents retail for a blank CD, why does the "industry" charge upwards of $15-20? Because people will buy it. Only an idiot would drop the price if people are willing to pay for it. But now we are not. We can get it for 33 cents. Do we feel bad? No. Why? Because we have to sit there and hear musicians who have more money than we ever will bitch about how they, as artists, are being screwed then watch them drive off in a car that we will never afford. We are sick of it and have found a way around it. It is a decaying industry, where all that matters is money. If you want to see how bad it really is check this out: http://www.blistering.com/news/newsdet.php3?ID=258 3
People are fed up and have been given an alternative. The only thing that can't be copied and digitalized is the live performance. Of course, the music industry will argue with me and say that I am wrong but the fact is that as soon as a song gets played on a radio, it's free for the taking and I do not see how the industry is going to stop it. The only way is to stop recording music, but that would kill the industry.