Will Everything Be Free on the Internet
Are we heading to a zero point when virtually all services offered on the internet are free of charge for the end user ?
More and more we see sites that once offered fee based services or single cost goods moving over to a free service supported solely by advertising or affliiate sales.
This was underlined yesterday by the music publisher Universal who announced they would now stop charging people for downloading any music from their catalogue (the world’s largest I believe)
Previous experience of such things suggest other publishers will follow shortly.
Quite where this leaves the retail music business remains to be seen.
A similar thing looks set to happen with one of the most lucrative parts of the internet:
Online dating.
This has overtaken porn in the money generating stakes but this too looks set to change with the huge success of Plenty of Fish who allow free registration etc and make their money on ads.
Whilst everyone likes something for nothing, somebody has to pay the price somewhere!
Rod said,
August 30, 2006 @ 12:33 pm
Just taken a look at the spirlafrog site which will host the free downloads.
Coming Soon !
They better have some bandwidth
What’s the chance of that site not crashing on the first day ?