Web users strike me mostly as naive idiots. It's like they suddenly looked up and are shocked, shocked! that all the free stuff on the internet they enjoy: high quality journalism like nyt or verge, gossip like gawker, games, free email + calendar + video services, free chat, free social network services, an excellent search engine, and on and on and on, actually required money to build and run! And that the companies involved are going to go to great lengths to earn as much advertising money as possible. You have to seriously be an idiot to think that all these companies building services that end users don't pay for aren't making money off the end users. Users had to choose between privacy/paying for things and free stuff, and they clearly chose free stuff.
It's definitely not the choice I would have made, but I got massively outvoted.
It improves the user experience by allowing amazing free services to exist.
That may be true, but that isn't what I meant.
I meant that there are numerous example where exposing your audience to something for commercial purposes may benefit the audience.
For example, the paid results of a search like http://www.google.com.au/search?q=web+hosting are arguably better than the heavily SEO'ed organic results. That's because the profit motive for the web companies encourages them to pay enough to expose themselves, whereas less legitimiate affiliate sites can't afford to compete because they are further down the profit chain (meaning they don't have the margins to pay for the most common keywords)
The other good example (as I noted elsewhere) are recommendation systems like Amazon and Netflix use.
It turns out that people actually prefer getting products for free with ads to paying for products. As bad as google and facebook are, they are providing what people want at the exact price point they want.
I disagree. The reasons are more straightforward. If there's a choice between a paid website, and a free website, the free one will win out. And advertising means you can offer users something for 'free'.
So lets say google switched to charging users for access to their search engine, a competitor would just popup that was 'free', and everyone would use that instead.
Probably because it's easier to quickly grow a free product/platform and then add monetization on top, than have users pay for access or endure a worse ad-cramped experience.
2. Data collection (after all if you are not paying you are the product) There is monetary value in collection, observation, and tracking of a vast amount of internet traffic.
3. Education. If you get people just starting out in their careers using your product or service for they hobby, personal project, etc then when they have a business need for some like your product or service they will just naturally choose you. Adobe and MS has been doing this for decades with low or no cost education licensing
Also, there's an increasing push in internet marketing circles to get people to sign up for things, even free things. The reason is that it bypasses a lot of antispying tech and law.
It's just the mindset that companies have given them - to rely on advertisers to fund free services.
There's so many ad based websites out there, we often think that paid websites have an ad-supported alternative. Though, the ones which don't and are exceptionally compelling will gain genuine customers.
Free is the key to a successful online company. Google, Facebook, Myspace and Youtube are the top web giants that prove this. When giving something away for free that consumers demand equals traffic. High traffic increases the value of ad space on a site. Google understands this very well and this why they have never attempted to sell any software or features they develope. I'm sure google spend a lot of time and money creating and perfect their free software that programers sell for hundreds of dollars. The internet is the only place were one can profit from giving away their product free. This is why old business models and rules do not apply to Online companies.
It's increasingly common everywhere on-line (and off-line). Companies consider advertising an additional revenue stream, and see no reason to not add it regardless of whether the product is paid for or distributed for free.
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