Comments on: Not everything can be free!

By: Scott Rafer

Scott Rafer — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 04:19:20 +0000

PlentyofFish, OKcupid, and WooMe are completely predictable and don't have a lot do to with "will everything be ad-supported?"

Any service valuable enough to be subscription-based will drop in value over time to the point where it can be ad-supported. Match.com and its peers have not radically improved in the past ten years. Web technology has gotten cheap enough to offer essentially the same service for free.

New subscription services will emerge from Web2. Flickr is good example so far. They'll either make Flickr Pro much, much better over the next 6 or 7 years or we'll have this discussion again about PlentyofPhotos, OKPix, and ShootMe in 2015.

By: Eric Berto

Eric Berto — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 23:51:47 +0000

The net result doesn’t always have to be zero. Consider advertising business goods and services in a business application (CRM, content management etc…). If you advertise those goods and services, you’re adding something of value to the application users and are adding money to the pot and not taking it away. The goal of Etelos Ad Serve is to provide application users and developers a way to add this value.

By: Court

Court — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 23:31:53 +0000

Movies are another example of an endless type of source for transactions behind online ads.

When we can effectively tie online advertising to increased offline consumption in more categories (and when more offline companies make their products/services available online), then there could be a lot more free models supported.

By: Charlie

Charlie — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 21:13:18 +0000

You don’t really mention the cost of producing these web technologies. I’m not really an expert but it seems to me that these costs must be coming down. This of course has been offset by people demanding more complexity. The cost however of providing old web 1.0 technologies like email and web sites seems to be fast approaching zero. I can’t imagine that I’d ever have to pay for an email account again. The technology’s invented. All Gmail is providing me is server space and a bit of ongoing R&D. It’s hard to charge people a fee for something which is costing you very little at that particular time but which cost you a lot 5 years ago.

By: Terry

Terry — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 21:07:46 +0000

See Chris Anderson's Free video. Storage, processing and bandwidth are approaching free, as is software and development.
plentyoffish.com showed me a staples.com ad, staples showed me post-it-notes. Everything seems to be in order.
In yahoo personals the only thing you are paying for is for a human to approve or deny your profile. So long, expensive lame service, it's been good to know ya.
When cars and office supplies become free then we can all panic over the fate of the dwindling internet.

By: George

George — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 20:29:02 +0000

People will pay for porn and gambling/gaming online, at least for now. Not sure about all the rest.

By: Gopi

Gopi — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 19:47:33 +0000

>> you need a bunch of external money like venture capital

Isn’t that what happened in the late 90's, VC’s were the only outside money entering the internet ecosystem and when it stopped the bubble bursted!