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. ;) "
... a good slashdotting is just what Piro needs.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
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
;-)
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.
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
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.
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?
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
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 $1k per employee.
Heh.
Ah, I see. So in order to keep people from slashdotting megatokyo.com, you post a link to megatokyo.com for them to jump to to read about why it's a bad idea for everyone to jump to megatokyo.com. Good idea, that...
"Offer people a good product, at the price the market is willing to bear, and they will buy it."
Um... well, obviously. The question here is more about whether the market is willing to bear any viable price at all.
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
Well, this rant by Piro doesn't surprise me in the least. Besides, it will help condition all slashdot users into believing that its a good thing they're going to start charging for a "premium" version of this site. The weird thing is, I LIKE the banner ads that are here. They pertain to my daily life. I'd rather just do donations to /., and am actually kind of surprised that there isn't a donations link (yes, I see the supporters link, but that's way too many clicks to spend my money) in main navigation.
Why did a free ecard site decide to go to a pay service when every other site has free ecards? I give Blue Mountain Arts three months to live out the dotcom death thrash. Fucked Company anyone?
Poor Piro,
.. you offer to give some snack that you *HATE* to a friend and thay are immediatly suspicious.
.. pimpin` for ca$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
Maybe if he'd done a comic on how it, apparently, fails.
I think he's premature, like many things about media, content and the net. Audiences are looking for different things on the net. Sure, in the early days almost everything worked, but once the novelty wore off there was, and is, focus on what apparently works. Don't move too fast to condemn the net, but rather than focusing entirely on what doesn't work, try to figure out what does. I'm getting a kick out of flash animated mini-films, I'd even kick in a subscription if I could be guaranteed a regular feed of neat animations via the web, and they certainly are getting more polished, as opposed to the crude stuff from a couple years ago.
Bottom line, be patient, markets sometimes take years to develop.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
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?
Big music artists have *already* sold out. The majority of them were sold out before they even started. Some sold out when they figured that playing nice with the big money label man was the way to get their music heard. And some, like Lars Ulrich, stormed the castle, then stayed for dinner, then began walking out like Rosen's trained monkey, because he could see they'd start, you know, losing royalties owed him and stuff, and then he wouldn't be able to take tennis lessons from Andre Agassi any more. Just kidding Lars, it's not you're fault the biz is crooked, just for forgetting it's crooked.
Go ahead and tell us all about your own lack of values, but I don't give out respect to people because they have money or money behind them. And most people don't either. Remember Leif Garrett? Bay City Rollers? Peter Frampton? No? Well take a good look, because that's where your Brittany 'n' Sync rekkids are gonna be. Real respect grounded on Qualities doesn't fade away, while fake respect based on money dies when the party's over (just like power built on fear crumbles as soon as vulnerabilities appear).
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
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 *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.
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!
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 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.
but information alone will not make money.
Google
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.
I totally agree with you. In business, the market leader gets 80-90% of the market while everybody else in the industry struggle for the 10-20%. It's a fact of economics, not just the internet.
.COM bursted early last year.
Let's put it this way. If I said, name an auction site, the majority of you will name Ebay. If I asked a random person on the street a ISP, a majority (unfortunately) would name AOL. If I asked you what IM system you use, a majority would say AIM.
Unlike other industries, the internet and technology in itself benefit from increasing returns. The fact that the number 1 player is 10x better than the number 2 and the number 2 is 10x better than 3 and the fact that capital was pouring in at a significant rate was the fact that the
However, the future looks bright from here on out. There are signs that the industry is coming back as more and more VCs are willing to put up the money and bigger money than in the last 6 months.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
> 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
>> 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?
Partially true. Google is actually a pretty profitable company. However, the main revenue source that they get do not originate from the end users, but rather through licensing schemes. One of their biggest customers is Yahoo [Notice the Powered by Google]. In addition to this, as you might have read in /., Google is marketting a "Google Search Appliance. This is actually a pretty high revenue stream as the demand for intranet searchable content increases.
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
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.
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
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
Have you not been paying attention in class? Advertising revenues amounts to dick. Information SHOULD be free, what a crock of shit. You've obviously never created anything of value to others. Why should I go through the effort and spend the time to make something if all I get back out of it is the satisfaction of knowing I just wasted a couple hours/days/weeks of my life I'm not going to get back. If you're tired of being nickel and dimed to death that is one thing, to suggest that everything ought to be free because you're a cheap fucking bastard is entirely different.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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.
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!"
no, I mean to have the choice to have an *additional* 50c *explicitly* added to your order (i.e. that shows up on your bill) for the only purpose of being given to a specified referrer.
Sort of like Amazon mantaining a list of sites you like to sponsor, and to make it easy to make a micro-payment to them (say, you add 50c to your order, amazon takes 5c commission, and gives 45c to the site).
I'm sure people wouldn't mind giving 50c now and then to sites they like if it was as easy as ticking a checkbox on the Amazon order page...
-- the cake is a lie
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
You've obviously never felt the satisfaction of making something of value and giving it away, and knowing that the hours/days/weeks you spent making it made many people's lives just a bit happier. If you think creating something is a waste of your life, I can't imagine what you're doing spending time posting on /.
I'd say the time you're wasting is the time during which you're not creating something. If you get paid for what you created, that's great, but if you only create to get paid, you're probably missing the point.
I fail to see how a comic artist's "rant" about economy is newsworthy. Perhaps an attempt to plug one's own site?
Dude...have you seen how many times MT's banner ad pops up here? They've gotta be one of the top advertisers.
Fuck freeloaders. I've made plenty of things and given them away and I've spent a good deal of time helping people for no charge. However I have a right to be compensated for my work if I so please. The point is not all information wants to be free, especially something I worked my ass off to create. You don't have any right to get that for free if I decide you ought to have to pay me for it. What the poster doesn't seem to get is not everything is free and assuming it should be without warrant is ridiculous. The original poster is just a fucking freeloader and I know they've never really put effort into something and created something other people actually wanted. If they had they wouldn't be so quit to decide that the creator of some form of content ought not have the right to be compensated. That's the Linux ethic though, people don't fucking contribute most of them don't even pay for a fraction of what they receive. It's just bitchery to use a freely available service without ever paying someone back for it. Most times the offer of repayment is payment enough, it shows appriciation for the time and effort spent.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
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.
"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.
You've obviously never felt the satisfaction of making something of value and giving it away, only to be slammed by an $800 bill by your ISP. What's going to happen next month? Will it rise to $1200?
That'll take the satisfaction out of your sails. You've created something wonderful, but you can't share it because you're in the red.
Creating something of value for the public that costs time and effort is easy. Creating something of value for the public that costs money is hard. Eventually, you go broke. Then nobody has any fun.
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
So is foresight. I knew that most of the dot.coms were going to crash way back when venture money was still being thrown at them hand over fist. So did most of the columnists of Forbes magazine. Why? Because the dot.coms were ignoring the fundamentals of business like "sell something for less than it costs you".
Anyone with any business sense--which apparently did not include a great many VCs--could look at the collapse later and say "Well, duh! I saw that coming."
I'm not even in business; what I know about it comes from a couple of Small Business Management courses and reading Forbes for a few years back in the early 90s--but, well, DUH! What was the special power of the Internet that it suddenly took away so many people's common sense?
My only regret is that I didn't apply for some venture capital to play with during the 90s. Silly me--I thought you had to have a business plan that MADE SENSE before a bank or venture capitalist would touch you. I couldn't think of one that would work for me, so I didn't try.
---dragoness
Thanks for the comments, I (at least) found them informative.
.com firms are out to lunch, though.
I'm pretty sure BM wasn't the web's best example of ineptitude, but I spoke about it mostly because the original story referred to it.
I would still say that online greeting cards (in and of themselves) aren't BM's business; you could probably say they are a service company and have found a market (albiet a smaller one) for doing what some people are willing to pay for rather than do themselves.
This is exactly the kind of exercise necessary if this industry is going to "make it", and the answers will be different for each situation; rather than the "me too" business models that seem all too common.
Perhaps BM does "get it" and they have asked the questions and made the changes to reflect that. At $35 million it might be viable; at $1 billion+ (Excite's blunder) I think it does show that some
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