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.
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
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.
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.
"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!
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
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.
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.
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.