I had once read a tweet, though I don’t remember the guy who tweeted (during one of my many experiments with Twitter back when it was smaller). Though not verbatim this is what he had tweeted – To me Internet = Free, I won’t pay for anything on the web. He clearly didn’t have any particular business interest on the web and was just a tech enthusiast is what I gauge now.
However, some of the news that has begun to float around recently and my own personal views in the not so distant past ( a week actually) made me revisit his thoughts. The news obviously being Pirate Bay’s re-emergence as a paid site, Kaazaa rising from the ashes as a paid site now. For among many other things P2P sharing somehow defined the whole free-web theory for me, it defined the mindset our Twitter friend shared in my opinion.
It isn’t practical to generalize, and two sites changing their identity doesn’t mean that everyone will follow suit of course. However, regardless of the success or failure that they might become, it does signal a possible shift in the way web publishers approach their service offering.
Till as near back as last year, banking on advertising while keeping the essential service free was perhaps the only business model a majority of them were aware of. Thankfully the recession helped them look for other options and far scalable ones at that.
A lot of people adopting such a practice would in face help consumers drop their strict guard against anything that isn’t free perhaps. And help drive models like say subscription or membership fee or as Clouds gain relevance for as much as they use. iTunes for instance has been the best example for both a different model as well as adoption for quite some time now. Will it spill the world over in the future, say a good 5 years from now (quite a lot fo time in the digital world)? Will people pay for even basic services that are now essentially free? That is the question.
On the other hand, free isn’t just synonymous with the web for many, it is what made the web what it is now. The scale of its growth, the demand for digital products, the world it has changed are perhaps in a small (or big) way results of a free web. Free software and free hosting for instance made a blogger out of me, then a web designer and a couple of years down the line from then.. an entrepreneur, so you can see the impact. Even if all web app makers, website owners decide to make their content or service paid, there will emerge people who will give out stuff for free, at least that is the case now. Not a bad mentality but perhaps bad business sense.
And perhaps one can’t remove that aspect of the web – that of sharing, it is sharing that has promoted so many of the things that are now free on the web. The biggest names on the web were essentially free (think Google, think Hotmail, think Twitter) and enabled sharing possible better and importantly free.
Is it a catch 22? Is paid services a trend that is waiting its turn? Or Will the Web always be the free baby that it is?
I am not sure where I read this, but some site (possibly muzu) will allow artists’ music to be played for free and will pay artists a percentage of the revenue it generates via ads.
My opinion: People will still possibly pay for Specialised services. One example is the widespread growth of Twitter. Soon, there’s a decent chance a lot of the stuff on twitter is spam. So, specialised Twitter analysis tools? WSJ is doing decently with its online version. If there’s really good content out there, there’s a good chance people will pay for it. For blogs and others to generate revenue, microfinance (or nanofinance) might work, give people a preview and charge them minimal amounts like 10-50 paise to view the rest of the analysis / article.
From an India perspective, I think the exchange rate affects badly. We are often given subsidies for goods sold in India (like books). Why not introduce that to e-commerce?