This post by Mark Evans makes me wonder what would happen if nothing was going to be FREE any more.
There are tons of applications and services on the web that we are addicted to. That said, I think that the number of paying users for those applications would be far from being low.
Let’s imagine a fee for some popular services and apps:
Gmail/Hotmail/YahooMail/…: $1 / month
Google Reader: $1 / month
Google Maps: $1 / month
Google.com: $0,001 / search
Linkedin: $0,01 / contact added
Facebook: $1 / month
Firefox: $2 / month
Twitter: $0,01 / update
Dopplr: $0,01 / trip shared
YouTube: $0,001 / video watched and 0,01$ / video uploaded
Delicious: $0,01 / link shared
Digg: $0,01 / link shared
Wordpress: $2 / download (thanks Mark for the suggestion)
Skype: $1 / download (upgrades for $0,5)
Would people be willing to pay? The point is that there are millions of people really addicted to those services and that (I bet) will surely pay.
We use to think that Internet is free and will always be free. I totally disagree. If I can get value I’m happy to pay a reasonable amount of money for that value. There is nothing new here, it works this way. With Paypal and Google Checkout everything would be easier than in the past and I’m pretty sure we would be surprised by the results.
Think of the television model: advertisers pay and you get contents for FREE. At the same time cable and satellite companies teach us that the monthly fee model works as well, so why not for the internet?
Here is (roughly) my internet bill for 2007: $82,15
Would I pay it? Oh yes.
luca filigheddu, paid internet
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