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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 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.
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 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.