Let's imagine that someone started a "free pizza service". Every single day, rain or shine, a pizza gets delivered to users of the site. For free! Pretty good, right?
But then the VC money starts to run low, and after a few experiments with printing ads on the box, the company announces the end of the service.
It would be easy for me to then write an outraged blog post. I might say stuff like "who's doing this to my free pizza service?" I might plaintively suggest that there has to be a business model that allows free pizza to continue. I might even say that I'd pay a reasonable sum ($10/month, perhaps?) in order to keep the daily pizzas flowing.
But, you know, there's no right to free pizzas, it's not my free pizza service, there is no business model that makes free pizza viable, and my willingness to pay clearly does not extend to the point of actually covering anyone's costs.
Now, the author is talking about Soundcloud, not pizza. But I think the onus is on her to demonstrate that these examples are different.
> There have to be business models that allow the creativity of sites like XKCD, Reddit, SoundCloud, and Tumblr, to flourish.
1) No there doesn't "have to be". Free pizza is awesome, but it doesn't mean giving anyone who asks a daily free pizza is viable. Maybe SoundCloud's old ad-free model is viable; maybe it isn't. The answer doesn't depend on how much you wish it was true though. If you want to talk about business models but you're not going to talk about bandwidth costs and user growth and capex, you're not being serious.
2) Also, XKCD seems to be flourishing pretty damn well. So is Tumblr and Reddit, despite the overly-publicised prophecies of doom people keep tossing around. (Sure guys, this time you're all going to switch to Voat. No, I totally believe you.) The only one I don't know about is SoundCloud, and I'm pretty sure they'd love to be "failing" the way Reddit is failing. But sure, maybe they really can't make the numbers work. In which case, they're going to go under, but that doesn't tell us much about the internet, just about the economics of streaming media in a world where bandwidth is a scarce good.
What this article seems to be looking for is a solid example of people taking a profitable service that delighted users, and making it more profitable in a way that annoyed users. What it actually has is examples of people taking an unprofitable service and trying to find a way to make it viable so they can continue to serve users. The former would be a useful stepping off point to a discussion of greed and public services; the latter is not.
But then the VC money starts to run low, and after a few experiments with printing ads on the box, the company announces the end of the service.
It would be easy for me to then write an outraged blog post. I might say stuff like "who's doing this to my free pizza service?" I might plaintively suggest that there has to be a business model that allows free pizza to continue. I might even say that I'd pay a reasonable sum ($10/month, perhaps?) in order to keep the daily pizzas flowing.
But, you know, there's no right to free pizzas, it's not my free pizza service, there is no business model that makes free pizza viable, and my willingness to pay clearly does not extend to the point of actually covering anyone's costs.
Now, the author is talking about Soundcloud, not pizza. But I think the onus is on her to demonstrate that these examples are different.
> There have to be business models that allow the creativity of sites like XKCD, Reddit, SoundCloud, and Tumblr, to flourish.
1) No there doesn't "have to be". Free pizza is awesome, but it doesn't mean giving anyone who asks a daily free pizza is viable. Maybe SoundCloud's old ad-free model is viable; maybe it isn't. The answer doesn't depend on how much you wish it was true though. If you want to talk about business models but you're not going to talk about bandwidth costs and user growth and capex, you're not being serious.
2) Also, XKCD seems to be flourishing pretty damn well. So is Tumblr and Reddit, despite the overly-publicised prophecies of doom people keep tossing around. (Sure guys, this time you're all going to switch to Voat. No, I totally believe you.) The only one I don't know about is SoundCloud, and I'm pretty sure they'd love to be "failing" the way Reddit is failing. But sure, maybe they really can't make the numbers work. In which case, they're going to go under, but that doesn't tell us much about the internet, just about the economics of streaming media in a world where bandwidth is a scarce good.
What this article seems to be looking for is a solid example of people taking a profitable service that delighted users, and making it more profitable in a way that annoyed users. What it actually has is examples of people taking an unprofitable service and trying to find a way to make it viable so they can continue to serve users. The former would be a useful stepping off point to a discussion of greed and public services; the latter is not.