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Competing Against Free
Matthew Yglesias has it right on Internet profitability:
But in the world of websites, it’s not clear that the ability to raise large sums of capital really is a huge advantage. The startup costs of a decent website are pretty small in the scheme of things. And there are lots of people and institutions—academics looking to bring their research to a wider public, think tanks and advocacy organizations looking to influence the public debate, corporations like Google looking to express their views on policy debates, students trying to get an edge in the job market, authors hoping to promote a book—with perfectly good incentives to run websites that don’t aspire to maximize profits.
Twitter Profitability
First off, I want to preface this post by saying that, in the long-term, I don’t think the Internet can be made “profitable.” This is because the medium itself is inherently opposed to profit-making: it can be done, but only at the cost of either a quick death (for example, Napster) or a slow death (MySpace) of whatever kind of service is being offered. I firmly hold to the idea that the Internet is a new, intellectual form of the “commons” and while the commons can be deterritorialized and reterritorialized by capital, that model can’t be sustained for what is essentially free (in that all information ought to be free).
That being said, I like Twitter. Although I had an account for about a year before I really “got” it, I now use it more than once every day and have found it mostly useful for interacting with people I know and don’t know. That’s also why I’d like to see Twitter remain independent: thus far, the Twitter team has provided a great service and it would be upsetting if even a fairly humane company like Google were to buy it and turn it into a Google Ads farm. That’s also why Twitter should probably figure out a way to at least nominally turn a profit.
There are a few ways to do this. One is to take Facebook’s “flat tax” approach: instead of charging anyone, Facebook just inundates you with ads (in your profile, in your sidebar, as…