Will everything eventually be “free”?
Not so long ago, it was taken as read that you needed to pay for all kinds of information.
Want a chart of share prices? You had to pay fairly large sums of cash to get it as recently as 10 years ago yet now it’s freely available. Want to read a play by Shakespere? You certainly had to buy that yet now many of the classics are online and even buying them in the shops costs less now in absolute terms than it did 10 years ago. I’m sure that you can think of many more examples of services which were chargeable up until quite recently yet which are now “free” or much cheaper than they were.
Except, of course, they aren’t free. Google might not directly charge you to do searches but all that computer power costs money and so you do pay for it by way of the adsense ads that you see just about everywhere these days. They’re just the largest example of course and untold thousands of smaller scale websites are paid for through advertising revenue nowadays when before you’d have had to pay for them directly.
Take our own listings sites. There’s no charge to list on them yet they’re comparable to sites that charge $50 to $200 for a listing. To be fair, they were something of a loss-leader (albeit always profitable) to begin with but that “free” tag means that they keep growing whereas comparable sites which charge need to constantly recruit new subscribers to replace those that haven’t renewed. In fact, thanks to us considering purchasing one of our charging rivals a couple of years ago we were able to see that our financing was comparable to theirs and indeed we were more profitable in relative terms (which surprised their then owner no end!).
But don’t mistake “ad-supported” as all of these “free” sites are with being actually “free”. You, or someone else, is certainly paying for them through the advertising carried by the various “free” sites.
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