There is no such thing as a free lunch
I’ve started this post at least twenty times in the last five years. It’s time to finish it.
Dear internet content consumer,
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
–Rob
Is that such a hard thing to understand? On the Internet it appears to be. For better and worse the Internet has had a “culture of free” since the days of the NSFNet and its Appropriate Use Policy (AUP) which restricted commercial use.
Content on the internet costs money to produce.
Metafilter user blue_beetle said it famously, “If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”
I won’t bore you with tales about the decline of newspapers in the US.
You can either pay for content with negotiable currency or with your attention (i.e., advertisements). A combination of psychological buying factors and transactional expenses make advertising the most plausible business model for content creators. Get over it.
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