"Too Cheap To Meter"

[yesthattom]

Dang! That’d be an excellent title for a book about the history of the internet, or the economics of the internet, or something.
xthread’s wrote a post that triggered the idea.

Paul Graham wrote an excellent article that sums up the point:

During the 90s a lot of people probably thought we’d have some working system for micropayments by now. In fact things have gone in the other direction. The most successful sites are the ones that figure out new ways to give stuff away for free. Craigslist has largely destroyed the classified ad sites of the 90s, and OkCupid looks likely to do the same to the previous generation of dating sites.

Serving web pages is very, very cheap. If you can make even a fraction of a cent per page view, you can make a profit. And technology for targeting ads continues to improve. I wouldn’t be surprised if ten years from now eBay had been supplanted by an ad-supported freeBay (or, more likely, gBay).

Odd as it might sound, [our consulting group tells] startups that they should try to make as little money as possible. If you can figure out a way to turn a billion dollar industry into a fifty million dollar industry, so much the better, if all fifty million go to you. Though indeed, making things cheaper often turns out to generate more money in the end, just as automating things often turns out to generate more jobs.

Amazon lists a book with a similar title, but nothing on the topic of the internet.

Maybe I should register that domain.

Comments

[xthread.livejournal.com]

Um, I trust you know I stole that line fair and square from the fight between Edison and Tesla about electric power, nu?

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

I didn't realize that.

...but it just makes it ever more appropriate for a book title!

[xthread.livejournal.com]

Oh, and while serving web pages is very, very cheap, serving them quickly and reliably is neither fast nor cheap. I spend a lot of my professional time these days explaining 'no, thirty seconds is not an acceptable server timeout interval, and no, 99.9% reliability is not good enough'

[marmota.livejournal.com]

Where good engineering practice meets good business practice is a chaotic and usually unhappy place. A good engineer sees a problem that can be addressed and takes on solving it. A good businessman sees a problem that can be addressed and takes on milking it as a market for as long as they can. I'm all for a responsible engineer making fifty million while curing something, *especially* if it beats out some jackass in a suit trying to make a billion selling palliatives. Of course, that would require adaptable businesses capable of retooling and moving on after closing out their initial target markets, so yes, I think I'm in agreement with Mr. Graham that it is a trend well worth encouraging.