For The Internet To Work, Everyone Has To Change
from the yeah,-nice-try dept
The thought process of the uncreative business people gets scary sometimes. In today's Guardian there's a column by the former managing director of Telewest's broadband content group explaining why he quit. He calls online users "cookie monsters" who simply want all their content for free (how dare they?!?!?). He goes on to talk about how evil we all are for wanting our free content. The crux of his argument seems to be that in order for him to have made money at Telewest, instead of coming up with a real business model, he was hoping that everyone else in the world would change how they agree to use the web. Any business model that is based on the idea that everyone needs to change how they're doing something (especially when they're quite happy doing what they're doing) seems like a particularly pointless business plan. He also seems to miss out on the point that people are paying for content in what they pay their ISPs. People pay for broadband connections because of what's online. Trying to then charge extra for every bit of content that passes through the connection is double billing, and most people intuitively understand this. It's just the uncreative business people who don't seem to understand the basic economics of how the internet works.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Wrong.
The two things(bandwidth and content, or cars and gas) are not directly connected. In most cases, they are not even provided by the same company.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Wrong.
The fact that the content providers don't make money from connection fees is their own fault. Just because they haven't come up with the proper business model to get some of the connection/ISP money doesn't mean it isn't double billing... it just means the content companies haven't realized that they're the attraction that is making the ISP's money.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Wrong.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Re: Wrong.
The basic economics of online content still stand: the marginal cost to display another page is minimal (approaching zero), such that the cost should approach zero as well, unless that information is somehow unique in a way that is not easily copied (such as timely financial news).
The content online is a commodity which should be used as a way to draw people into paying for something else... one of those "something elses" should be the connection fee.
[ link to this | view in thread ]
if the advertising model were working ...
But 2 things to consider:
first - most of the info put on the web is part of a pay for visibility swap people are willing to afford, in a similar way corporations pay for visibility buyng ad space so ... it isn t free as much as free TV is
second - the web is extremely young and is coming up with new ways of handling it, not necessarily the ones big media wants to see.
Big media should consider this thing, they are in a clear channel conflict because their model doesn t work for the web. And making the WWW a VPN doesn t sove the conflict, it s just a retreat
[ link to this | view in thread ]
Problem is the web isn't only commercial
We were spending money to go online long before the web became all about big business and making money. Everybody forgets the community aspect of the web, and the bloggin phenomena is a great example. A certain portion of the web has nothing to do with making money.
Guess what Mr.Docherty? The net is an anarchistic space, and was so long before it became officially commercialized in 1995. Commercial interests are still the newcomers and it's up to them to fit in with the technology and more importantly, the culture of the users, not the other way around. If business can't figure out how to make money from the web then they don't have to be there. And people will gribe about popups and try to circumvent them--guess what--that's just too bad. We ignore commercial on TV or skip over them, go to the bathroom or whatever. Deal with it. There are plenty of business models out there that do work so rather than cry like a little child about it not being fair, either figure it out or find another line of work.Oh and guess what Mr. Docherty? It is exactly the villainous Cookie Monster attitude that allowed me to read your article and allowed you a forum to express your view. Do you think I would have paid a nickel to hear what some whiny failure executive had to say about something? Of course not, but because it was free, I read it.
[ link to this | view in thread ]