Quote:
Originally posted by Rolo@Feb 14 2003, 04:49 PM
There will be even more free content in the future - there is only 1 way to stop it... politics/goverments, but thats probably not going to happen within the near future...
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Rolo, in a past life, I use to do rental car yield management - the process of pricing available cars for maximal revenue and utilization of resources.
One of the simpliest (and stupidest) ways to assure full utilization of cars was the "cheapest in the market". Basically, a certain percentage of potential customers will rent from whoever has the lowest price, all other things being equal. The cars are the same, the locations are the same, the service is the same - price is the point of difference. Being cheap gets you more clients.
However, those more clients don't make you the most money - and more importantly, if you are playing against other people in the same situation (and you always are) you often end up in price wars that lower the actual TOTAL market revenue and don't grow either company's business.
Free content, free galleries, free all that stuff is basically the same product. "If I give enough stuff away, people will come to my site and MAYBE buy something". We have passed from 1 in 100 to 1 in 400 to 1 in 1000 to 1 in I don't even want to think about it. This has all happened in the battle to have "the most for the least".
General "porn" is almost dead on the net as a result.
With too many programs willing to give away the store to get clients in the door, the free galleries / content / movie clips / etc won't stop. But the economics of the situation are shifting quickly, and this whole industry is due to shift gears VERY soon.
Link sites I operate have seen more than 10% of all listings go 404 or no host in the last 30 days. There are larger numbers of free site webmasters who just can't afford to pay to renew domains, can't afford to pay for hosting, and are disappearing. I ran the link bot 3 days ago, I suspect I can run it again today and find another 1-2% gone in that time frame.
The end of "as it was" started about 6 months ago... and it won't be long now.
But there are sunnier days on the other side, where new choices can be made, less players will be around, and the same money will be spread to less people.
Alex