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Etherpad, for example, charged for it's product. You could use it for free, but if you wanted private pads and custom domains/urls you could upgrade to Pro. I don't see how "doesn't have a business model" applies to that.
As someone that runs a paid service, I can tell you it's awesome to interact with customers. There's an air of respect that you don't get from completely open products.
You haven't run into the ones that think that because they shelled out $15, you are their personal butler?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a false choice. Using google to search doesn't make me a "product". They just happen to be able to make a ton of money showing adverts, which are useful for me also. Ignore advertising revenue at your own cost. But OTOH, this is hackernews, so continue hating advertising lead business models as usual...
It does make you a product. Google can take the millions of you searching for that term and say "hey you people related to that term", and sell them based on the fact that you searched for it an a small percentage of you will click that advertisments. I almost feel that we are lucky that advertisements are more profitable when they are more useful to us, god forbid if A/B testing showed that FULL PAGE FLASHING BANNER…
Why is it a problem? So they show me a few adverts... big whoop. I can just ignore them.
The issue is, the vast majority of people will never pay for access to online websites/apps (Me included). If you restrict yourself to the business model "charge users", then you've just got rid of 99% of the online population.
Advertising means that everyone gets what they want (Apart from the very very small but overly vocal minority that don't like adverts or have privacy concerns).
I love Pinboard, but it's a one man operation. Maciej is extremely susceptible to get hit by a bus tomorrow, leaving me without my $9.23 and all of my bookmarks. You're telling me that if someone offered you $1-5 mil to lead a team at insert huge tech company here you'd turn it down? Bitch, please. That chart is overall correct, but it's not like paying is suddenly going to be a panacea. I give flickr $25 a year, but…
You might also want to tone down the snark.
He keeps saying "free software", and also says "anti-free software movement". He means "free service", which is a radically different scenario from "free software" in either sense, and should be treated as such. Whether we're talking about Free software or just freeware, the user's use of a normal piece of software on their computer doesn't suddenly disappear when the developer goes away.
From the article: But free web services are not like free software. If your free software project suddenly gets popular, you gain resources: testers, developers and people willing to pitch in. If your free website takes off, you lose resources.
"Free website" often means "hugely profitable website"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the article: But free web services are not like free software. If your free software project suddenly gets popular, you gain resources: testers, developers and people willing to pitch in. If your free website takes off, you lose resources.
Perhaps thats a sign the webapp-for-things-that-don't-need-to-be-webapps model has flaws. Nahhh. That can't be it.
But I don't think charging your customers for your service means that you will never consider being acquired; I think it means that your exit strategy is to serve your customers with this great service you've built. It's the difference between a long-term strategy of "God I hope we get acquired" versus one of sustainability.
Sites that don't charge are floating on investor money, and investor money would really like to get oodles of money back eventually, instead of slowly growing a modest business that comfortably supports one or two people.
I don't have the link anymore, but there's an excellent essay that says exactly this using a metaphor about strip mining versus farming.
Anti-free software? I don't think free software is antithetical to the movement for charging a leg and an arm. The hard part is figuring out how to charge an arm and a leg for open source software. However, everyone take the easy way out by closing down on mission critical and open source the rest. I thought of a possible solution that allow everyone to charge an arm and leg while still being open source, or even pub…
So... er how exactly would you bootstrap this business model? Yeah, this might (with a very small probability) work if you're already an established, successful webcomics author. If you're starting out, though, you have no chances of success. Who's going to chip in for a comic that may or may not be good when it is finished?
All my ransom are met, because I didn't have an extreme expectation that I was going to raise hundred of dollars at the beginning of the publication.
Compared to advertising, it performs far better in term of revenues. More importantly, it doesn't uglify your site or make your site worse unlike what advertising usually does.
How much better? I would need to perform manual collection to get these figures. With automation, I would be able to tell you, right down to 8 digit place.
The problem with this business model is that people doesn't do the work that allows them to reach their goal, or they have an extreme expectation of how much money they are going to raise. If you don't have the fanbase, you ain't going to raise much money.
It's not that it might work with a very small probability. It will works, to varying degree of success, depending on the popularity, how loyal your fans are, and so on.
I seen a writer who done the exact same thing, but I don't have the link handy. So, I know it works.
The more interesting question is how it will perform compared to other business models such as advertising, selling in dead tree format, merchandising, live performance, and so on, depending on the relevancy of each business model for particular industries. Like I said, advertising earn me money, but it perform terribly to how much money I can get by ransoming contents.
This article operates under the very incorrect assumption that paid services never shut down and free services are never carried on by their purchasers. See Flickr or YouTube or PayPal or Skype or Picnik or Grand Central or Picasa or Siri or mySpace or FriendFeed or FeedBurner or even pinboard's biggest competitor Delicious for examples of the latter. As for the former, there's an unlimited number of examples (for a…
I was a Delicious user for years, with thousands of links tagged, and I continued using it for as long as I could stand under Avos, but the features that they cut and/or broke in the transition finally made me throw up my hands, give up, and switch...first to Trunk.ly, which Avos then bought and shut down (oops), and then to Pinboard.
I for one welcome my new Pinboard masters, especially if they're willing to fight to keep the service alive. :)