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?
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.
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.
Well, as user #196596, count me out.
If you compare every piece of writing that delves into something a troll like you wouldn't understand to Katz - yes, agreed, Katz can get repetitive and annoying AT TIMES - then you should be the one packing your bags, in shame.
Fred is a smart guy and wouldn't rant giant loads of trash on his own page as you so allude him to. Give him a break. He's no industry analyst or Robert X. Cringely. He's just a manga artist that vents his thoughts on his own personal web page - just like thousands if not millions of other normal people around the world who share themselves with each other.
So is the problem that each time something gets slashdotted that it goes under a vastly different scrutiny filter? If you're mad at the story, shouldn't you be more mad at the person who submitted it? It's like submitting a story to someone's livejournal!
I rest my case.
You really don't get it do you?
From the rant:
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.
Remind you of a various software development projects?
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.
The fact is they're still dumb. They saw that the internet was popular, and their kneejerk reaction was to try to think up a way to capitalize financially on that. They're still doing it.
Analysts come up with figures: x% of internet users will be going wireless by 200y. So they just pump millions of dollars into creating infrastructure, never bothering to look at those figures with any intelligence. How did some guy in a little office downtown come up with these figures? Surveys? Estimations? Listening to wireless company executives' pipe dreams?
Look at interactive TV. For YEARS they've been churning out one failed interactive TV venture after another. They've managed to convince themselves that people want to talk to their TV, and it doesn't matter how many times it fails, they're still lining up to make the next doomed platform.
Not everything can be commoditized, and it's a sad statement on our current culture when the first question that pops into some greedy, inept "entrepreneur" is how much can I make? Piro put it very simply and clearly; just because people like something doesn't mean they're going to pay for it, especially if they used to get it for free (it was a nice change from his usual rants, which usually run along the lines of "this strip has sucked any enjoyment out of my life, and I now live in a constant hell of fatigue and despair. I'm so very, very tired..." Wish the poor guy would realize we don't mind if a strip is a few days late.)
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.
"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 --
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!
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
I found this gentle rant had a well considered analysis of how some people perceive the web. While some parts of the web enhance and complement my traditional information needs, such as dictionary lookups, news, product information, the volume and diversity of the rest of the web helps me to "see further" (to paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton). I can start by building on the knowledge and experience of others, rather than repeating their trials and experiments.
Piro discusses adding something very much like a bait-and-switch scheme to the Field of Dreams business model. "If you build it, they will come". I think this strategy works well for making information available, but does not work well for making money from those visitors, unless they have come visiting intending to spend money.
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?
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?
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
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 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?
Perhaps because there is a significant audience that appreciate both his manga & his rants as "content". I'm guessing here, I don't read MT, and i prefer my rants alillt emore structured, a little less "rantish".
Hmm, well, let's see if we can't define a few type's of .com's
- A)"Companies" with no product
- B)"Companies" with useless/worthless products
- C)"Companies" with unoriginal products (ie, reworked mailorder)
- D)"Companies" who sell other peoples content (ie, searchengines, auction houses etc)
- E)"Companies" with nich markets & nearly managable costs
A&B are gone. C got bought out by "brick & mortar" giants. D are just starting to break even, but must be truly massive to even work at all (ie, Ebay & Amazon). Leaving just E as the last surviving member of the "the-intenet-is-going-to-allow-every-small-publisGiven the above, I think the "was free, but now requires a subscription" model (really the "I guess add revenue just won't cut it" model) covers a fairly large chunk of the .com's still worth worrying about.
Of course it wasn't planned, but if you cast a critical eye on the whole mess it's pretty clear that a real "planned" business model had nothing to do with it at all. Nobody, really, had a business model worth shit. But just because they were "bad" or "poorly thought out" or "required some tweaking (read, major surgery)" doesn't mean they weren't models. They just sucked ass.
No? When a self sufficient (or close) content provider says you really can't charge for a product that (by hook or by crook) is largely traded for non monetary rewards I would think, considering that amount of hate mail Valenti must get, there would be those who think that the rant is rather important after all.
Well, I rather think that's your problem, eh? Nobody around here is interested in "making you think"
Oh, and BTW, I'd rather read someone who's actively creating, rather then one who thought that "disenchanted" was a usefull trademark/logo. Im pretty good at being disenchanted all on my own - I don't need any help. Thank you.
"Sanity is not statistical", George Orwell, "1984"
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.
merchandizing, merchandizing, merchandizing, where the real money from the site is made.