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###Issue 030: Free for all in freefall###In This Issue:
Editor's view: Free for all in freefall A big discussion point online and in the media has been whether free internet services will or can survive. Well, the answer is that they will not. Businesses cannot offer free content, unless they are making money somewhere else, or the free stuff is a conduit to sales of other products. At the end of April, the warning signs were waving at web sites overloaded with free content, large and small. There was a great deal of negative online publicity when the fashionable site salon.com announced that it was going to charge for sections of its site. Oops. But if the content has value, people will pay. NetImperative.com begged its 8000 free subscribers for a voluntary £50 subscription for 6 months, but fewer than 5% chose to donate. As a subscriber myself, I was among the 95% who kept their money in their pockets -- because NetImperative does not offer me added value as an information supplier. This week I received an email thanking me for my help and the pledging the continuance of the service. A small portion of the writing fraternity became involved in a heated discussion when the moderator of the daily Online Writing list, Steve Outing, announced that he was closing the list temporarily, pending voluntary subscriptions to his web site at www.content-exchange.com. He was comforted with sufficient donations to keep going, accompanied by a flurry of abuse from many angry subscribers to the discussion list. On one memorable day the Online-Writing (OWL) list generated enough contributions to a recent weekend debate to make that edition of OWL easily the largest email document to have arrived in my in-box. Businesses which have charged for their information services from the outset do have the same problems. Two profitable information sectors are finance and sex: the Wall Street Journal, which charges $59 (£40.70) a year, has 574,000 subscribers; and Playboy boasts 83,000 members, who each pay $6.25 (£4.30) a month. It is a business truism that "free" -- to rewrite the words of the song -- " is just another word for nothing left to lose". Free only make sense if it provides customers with a portal to your products, and, ultimately, profit. On the matter of free content, sense has gone out of the window, and all those anorak webbies who are demanding something for nothing are not living in the real world. Free is simply does not offer a proper business model. And it is time to move away and get back to the traditional business track of product and planning and pricing and marketing and (most important of all) customers and sales and profit. As the cliche goes, this is not "rocket science", and now most people are waking up to this reality, we will cease to dream of dotcom companies which can survive and succeed by being all presence with no product. And then the internet will come into its own... as the most amazing instrument of conveying information invented by man. The online opportunities are still there for those with the mind and the products and the marketing skills. That much has not changed. Election online: a "fever" of apathy Recent months have been a key period for elections in the western world, and , to a greater or lesser extent, they will all be influenced by the internet. After the American presidential elections, we are now facing polls in Italy and then in the UK (on 7 June). I could not resist having a quick look at the sites of the main UK party to see how they are shaping up online. This was on Thursday 10 May, two days after the official announcement of an election which had been flagged for months (and only postponed from May by the incidence of foot and mouth). Despite all the open warnings that there would be an election this summer, only the Conservatives (Tories) had their Manifesto up and running online by 10 May. Their site scored good marks for efficiency and clarity -- and only the Tories had claimed a "dotcom" URL, for what that is worth. But none of this seems likely to help them avoid a landslide defeat, if the opinion polls are anything to go by. The site of the governing Labour party led with "knocking copy" about the Conservative Opposition as its main story: "The true cost of a return to the Tories" And the link to Labour's mini manifesto -- the "Pledge card" revealed a box where the text was so small as to be virtually unreadable (never mind unintelligible). Are they hiding their promises in the small print rather than trumpeting them from the rooftop?! As for the third major party in British politics, the Liberal Democrats, this was the first site I visited, purely because an old-fashioned flyer was posted through my office door on Wednesday morning. Now, I expected that the LibDem site would be wizard, because I supposed that the party would attract a fair proportion of techies. But no... it is rather dull, unconvincing and slow to load. The LibDems had no fewer than two images of their personable but portly leader Charles Kennedy -- interestingly, Labour had none of the Prime Minister, Tony (the tonsure) Blair, while the Tories had one of William Hague, their feisty but failing leader (it remains a mystery how he manages to be both) ...
So much for all the talk of the British system becoming too personalised and presidential. And the prevailing mood in the UK is... All of the main party sites could do better. I dearly wanted a prominent link from the home page to FAQs. Even if the manifestoes were not ready surely the parties knew their policies on the key issues -- the economy, taxes, Europe, health, education, crime the National Health Service etc. Why, oh why, can't they all have a permanent FAQ section on site? Oh well, 2001 has probably come too early for a true online election campaign in the UK. Roll on 2005. See what you think. For me, all three sites failed to grasp the key principles and the best practices of online marketing.
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1. Information
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3. Discussion boards Looking for success stories? Ebay, the online auction house, is still proving to be one of them. It surpassed expectations with its first quarter figures for 2001, with revenues of $154 million, up 79% on the first quarter for 2000. Then in May eBay surpassed Amazon.com in the battle for online traffic, according to Nielsen NetRatings. And Adventive, mentioned in the last issue of AIMS, have published some positive dotcom news. Here is an excerpt from a recent edition of i-Sales:- ==> IT'S NOT ALL DOOM & GLOOM OUT THERE The investment community is starting to realise that there are some solid Internet businesses -- and the throwing the baby out with the bath water has come to an end. Consider the following:
Source: BizReport (30 April) I thought you would like to know that, although, of course, this fails to add the old saying (apparently forgotten during the dot bubble of 1999-2000): "What goes up, comes down". Until next time... Return to AIMS index |
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