association-list

I’m sure that this has been noticed before, but I’ve never seen it directly laid out, so here goes:

There exists a tra­jec­tory for any good, ‘free’ web ser­vice, be it a social net­work, a search engine, a blog­ging plat­form, etc.. It looks some­thing like a par­a­bolic arc. The height of its apex and the speed with which it is reached are dif­fer­ent each time, but with enough data, you begin to see similarities.

In the early days, things suck. The site is ugly, it’s slow some­times, maybe they haven’t got their core mechan­ics nailed down, or for a social net­work, the fea­tures are good but there is no one there. As things pick up steam, the ven­ture vul­tures begin cir­cling, more people get hired, and things start to rapidly improved. Things look better, more of your friends are using it, there’s some actual infra­struc­ture money. There is a long, bright period at the top of the arc wherein every­thing is lovely on the user side. At the com­pany, though, they know already that grav­i­ta­tional rot has already set in. They’ve never charged you any­thing, because no one ever charges you for any­thing. They may not even be sure that the prod­uct is worth enough to ask you for money. But the des­per­ately need some. The high lifestyle of all their new coders and design­ers costs money, and the cap­i­tal men lurk­ing in the back­ground are get­ting all sweaty in antic­i­pa­tion of their expected liq­uid­ity event.

If you and they are lucky, some big com­pany will swoop in and pro­vide the release that every­one is look­ing for, buying you up and then run­ning you for years with benign neglect while they fold the bit of your tech that they wanted into their own prod­uct, or try to steal your user base or gen­er­ally just figure out some way to make actual money out of you. Often a ser­vice can live in this limbo for years, pro­vid­ing use value and plea­sure. The ending here tends to be swifter, when the new owner finally decides to shut the ser­vice down, or ‘re-​​brand’ (almost always a fatal wound).

When no fairy god­par­ent comes around, though, you enter the dread busi­ness of ‘mon­e­ti­za­tion’. For the most part, this comes in two fla­vors: charg­ing for pre­mium ser­vices or start­ing to sell ads. I have no prob­lems with using pre­mium ser­vices to sub­si­dize a free ver­sion. It’s a model that I like a lot, although I feel like people aren’t par­tic­u­larly trans­par­ent about their busi­ness models or flex­i­ble in their pric­ing (you have to take this with a grain of salt, coming from me. I think the Swedish(?) policy of having everyone’s tax bill be public is a great idea). Usu­ally, though, this seems to be the best way to post­pone the inevitable decline of a web ser­vice, although some of your users will inevitably com­plain that start­ing to charge money is actu­ally part of your decline.

Go down the path of adver­tis­ing, though, and you’ve basi­cally sub­mit­ted to your fate. It seems easy at first, because ad com­pa­nies like Google have made it really easy to drop stuff right in. You make a little bit of money, but not really enough to pay anyone. So you have to make more changes. You real­ize that you’re actu­ally answer­ing to two sets of cus­tomers now, and only one of them is paying you. So you make com­pro­mises. Over time, you real­ize that your adver­tis­ers are win­ning every time their desires come into con­flict with those of your users. Even­tu­ally your users real­ize this, too. Then they leave, if they have any place to go.

Google is enter­ing this phase right now. They weath­ered the own­er­ship prob­lems and the exter­nal CEO, and any number of other issues that could have sunk them. But inex­orably, since it holds the purse strings, the ad-​​serving part of their busi­ness will take over, and will ruin the user expe­ri­ence and use­ful­ness of their ser­vice for every­one. Already there are issues: if you run ad-​​blocking soft­ware (which is within your rights. If they don’t want cus­tomers who don’t see ads, they’re wel­come to turn you away, which is within their rights), or soft­ware that keeps them from track­ing you else­where on the web, it breaks basic search most of the time. At this time, there is no real exit, so you can only chose voice and evasion.

These are hard times. Busi­ness models are in vio­lent flux. Many com­pa­nies are not sure where their next dollar is going to come from. I sym­pa­thize with people who’re using ads to patch together a busi­ness that they love into some­thing that works. The market isn’t fair or per­fect or even good, most of the time. I am not sure that there are good answers. Pre­mium ser­vice pric­ing is only a par­tial solu­tion, and isn’t going to work for every­one. Inde­pen­dent artists are a par­tic­u­lar quandary. It’s time, though, to start look­ing around for solutions.