Average user can't afford pay for all the free service they receive. If each user had to pay $20 a month for even only the top twenty websites they use and this would be beyond the reach of the average user; Google, Facebook, Free Apps, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Twitter, etc.
Don't Be a Free User (2011)
81–90 of 107 posts
Re: Don't Be a Free User (2011)
#82Average user can't afford pay for all the free service they receive. If each user had to pay $20 a month for even only the top twenty websites they use and this would be beyond the reach of the average user; Google, Facebook, Free Apps, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Twitter, etc.
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Re: Don't Be a Free User (2011)
#83Average user can't afford pay for all the free service they receive. If each user had to pay $20 a month for even only the top twenty websites they use and this would be beyond the reach of the average user; Google, Facebook, Free Apps, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Twitter, etc.
Is there a way to actually estimate how much money I would have to give per month to compensate for the ads I see on the web? Perhaps some browser plugin that counts ad impressions? I doubt that any one web site makes $20 per month from my visits.
Re: Don't Be a Free User (2011)
#84Average user can't afford pay for all the free service they receive. If each user had to pay $20 a month for even only the top twenty websites they use and this would be beyond the reach of the average user; Google, Facebook, Free Apps, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Twitter, etc.
I don't know about that. I'm sure $20 is too much for some people, but in the United States, at least, $20 isn't much compared to the other costs of accessing the web. It's very easy for a DSL, cable, or mobile contract to cost $50-150 a month already.
Re: Don't Be a Free User (2011)
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience running a project/company like you describe: 1) Not the geeks, but the big multinational companies with disposable developer time end up using your open-source solution. Exactly the types of users I don't feel sorry for and would rather extract money from. 2) The "payback" in the form of bug reports and patches is negligible, because nobody likes to do work if they're not being compensated (either throu…
I can't see why any free software user would consider it unreasonable to charge for delivery of a service as long as the source code for the service is freely available. There's nothing in the FSF / OSI that says anyone is entitled to free operation of software! There are consumer orientated services like Newsblur ( http://newsblur.com ) that do this. There are business orientated services such as SugarCRM ( https://…
There's a common belief among regular people (not actual knowledgeable of the philosophies behind the concepts) that "open source" means everything is free. As a company which sells hosting and development based on an open source project, we see this all the time. That's why we generally avoid mentioning "open source" at all in our marketing (as does Newsblur and SugarCRM, from what I can see).
Re: Don't Be a Free User (2011)
#86Average user can't afford pay for all the free service they receive. If each user had to pay $20 a month for even only the top twenty websites they use and this would be beyond the reach of the average user; Google, Facebook, Free Apps, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Twitter, etc.
I don't know about that. I'm sure $20 is too much for some people, but in the United States, at least, $20 isn't much compared to the other costs of accessing the web. It's very easy for a DSL, cable, or mobile contract to cost $50-150 a month already.
$20/month for each of the top 20 sites you use is $400/month.
Re: Don't Be a Free User (2011)
#87Average user can't afford pay for all the free service they receive. If each user had to pay $20 a month for even only the top twenty websites they use and this would be beyond the reach of the average user; Google, Facebook, Free Apps, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Twitter, etc.
I don't know about that. I'm sure $20 is too much for some people, but in the United States, at least, $20 isn't much compared to the other costs of accessing the web. It's very easy for a DSL, cable, or mobile contract to cost $50-150 a month already.
He's saying $20 per service, though.
The way to make the economics work is the same way the economics of cable TV work - bundling.
Re: Don't Be a Free User (2011)
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's what danieldk meant. Terrific != terrible (english is not my primary language so I might be wrong)
I think user5994461 meant that calling windows backwards compatibility "terrific" doesn't do it justice. My dad wrote software more than 2 decades ago that, amazingly enough, still runs on Windows 10 and he still uses it.
And they had a subsystem for 16-bit OS/2 applications until Windows 2000:
https://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windowsnt/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Microsoft_Window...
Re: Don't Be a Free User (2011)
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know about that. I'm sure $20 is too much for some people, but in the United States, at least, $20 isn't much compared to the other costs of accessing the web. It's very easy for a DSL, cable, or mobile contract to cost $50-150 a month already.
He's saying $20 per service, though. The way to make the economics work is the same way the economics of cable TV work - bundling.
Oh, sorry, I misread.
$20 per month per service seems like a ridiculously huge jump for services that are currently "free with advertising," though. Surely nobody is making $20 per user per month with advertising.
At $20 a month per service the bigger problem would be people like me who can afford it just fine but don't think most services provide nearly that much value.
Re: Don't Be a Free User (2011)
#90Average user can't afford pay for all the free service they receive. If each user had to pay $20 a month for even only the top twenty websites they use and this would be beyond the reach of the average user; Google, Facebook, Free Apps, LinkedIn, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Twitter, etc.
Is there a way to actually estimate how much money I would have to give per month to compensate for the ads I see on the web? Perhaps some browser plugin that counts ad impressions? I doubt that any one web site makes $20 per month from my visits.
Appears AVG used to have an estimator called PrivacyFix, but site is now dead. Here's a story covering it:
http://adage.com/article/digital/worth-facebook-google/29304...
Author claims the tool estimated that their value to Google alone would have been $200+ and explains why too.