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Comment by lidmith | Hacker News Reader

Hmm, on the whole monetization thing, there are a lot of good services that people (myself, anyways) would not pay money for. Twitter, Gmail, others. Figuring out how to monetize in a way other than "sell your product to your customer" is a real problem for such services.

Btw, I have never clicked on a google ad. Not once. I also now have adblock installed. Monetizing useful but free services is a tough problem, not to be dismissed.

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I think what she's trying to get at is that you should try to focus more on ideas that have monetization baked in rather then the ones that just try to get popular and figure out how to make money afterwards.

In that sense, figuring out how to monetize good but free services is a non-issue because you won't be building a good but free service.

Yes, you got it!

There's also a good reason to believe that lots of people WOULD pay for something like Gmail.

Remember people trying to sell off invites back in the early days?

More importantly, having a direct line to the company controlling their email -- attached by money -- is a very appealing prospect for people who understand that free is dicey.

They will pay if it's effortless and trivially cheap and the competition isn't free either. The app store(s) have proved this.

Yes, people will push a meh product, not do any ground marketing, do a piss poor job of communicating, -- and, from the start, not solve a problem or reach out to their customers in the right way -- then they will fail to make sales, and they will blame the "well-known fact" that people don't pay for things.

In the mean time, I'm making a lot of money selling things where there are tons of free alternatives. People don't pay for content? I made $40,000 writing & selling an ebook about rich web app performance.

I'm hardly the only one.

Lots of people would rather blame the market, blame the customer, or blame the economy than consider that maybe they didn't do due diligence.

I'll be writing a lot more about that in the future.

People do pay for gmail. It's called Google Apps.

I guess the thinking is that your so impressed with gmail for personal use that when you do start up a company you will use them for your business.

Gmail could probably cost money and have a big userbase (at least now, when so many people know about it and use it).

But I think a lot of the community sites can't charge money. I don't see Twitter, Reddit, StackOverflow and other such community sites gaining nearly enough users that way.

Stack Overflow is explicitly a rebellion against Expertsexchange which has a free option with lots of upsell.

I'm pretty sure that there's at least 100,000+ people who would gladly pay for premium Twitter services. The amount people pay for superior Twitter clients and other ecosystems is an example.

Granted the network effect is still in effect, but it could be a killer freemium.

Of course you would pay for GMail - if the price was right. If an ad-free version of GMail cost 1¢/year (a lifetime for a dollar!), you would pay for it. In fact, you would probably pay a lot more that that if Google wasn't offering their service for free. And someone could easily still sell a webmail product, if it were better than GMail.

You can just mention death in all your emails to remove the ads. Google doesn't want to offend you by advertising coffins and funeral services for your deceased relative/friend. It's been a while since I've tried it, but it used to work.

The other trick here is that you are not Google. Nobody who is Google is going to read my post. They can afford to run at a loss -- because their goal, remember, is to have all of the information in the world. Therefore Gmail serves their ends, even if you never click an ad.

It's a bad idea to look at a behemoth like Google, who operates on completely different physics, and decide to model yourself after them without knowing the full story.

While I understand that they do tailor their ads to the information in your email, it was my (perhaps naive) understanding that the particulars of your emails were not used outside of determining those ads. Am I wrong in this?

Hmm, it seems we can only nest three times. (edit) nevermind, I either missed the reply button when looking for it, or it wasn't there before, but I see I can nest further (end edit)

Anyways, I have a couple of ideas kicking around in my skull. Right now I'm trying to get some work so I can fund them with my salary though. One idea relies on ads for money, because no one in their right mind would pay for such a simple service. The other two are direct sales things.

Also, after reading the article, I became curious about which "fucking awesome" products the author (you?) is selling. I didn't see any links on the page to them.

>Hmm, it seems we can only nest three times. (edit) nevermind, I either missed the reply button when looking for it, or it wasn't there before, but I see I can nest further (end edit)

The reply button only shows up after some amount of time, which increases with nesting level.

Whoops, forgot to update my sidebar.

My main products now are:

http://letsfreckle.com/ http://jsrocks.com http://yearofhustle.com/

EDIT: I also do in-person (and soon, online) JavaScript training (http://jsmasterclass.com)... and I have quite a lot of free not-for-money sites you might recognize, including http://twistori.com and http://everytimezone.com

EDIT: I am a linkwhore.

> I am a linkwhore.

The fancy word for that is "meretrix" (or the Latin "meretrice" for maximum pomposity). A word like that suits your style, even if the definition doesn't :-)

I couldn't tell you, I don't know. But their public mission is to index all the world's information. That much we do know for sure, since they've said it themselves.

They are also clearly trying to cover ALL the bases, to have everybody sucking at their proverbial info-teat. They want you to store your calendar, docs, contacts, phone, videos, status updates, internet reading, spreadsheets, etc., etc., all on their servers.

Did you know they used Goog-411 to collect spoken phonemes to improve their auto-captioning of YouTube videos (so they can search them)?

This is clever… and largely unknown… and slightly scary, since it shows on the kind of game they're playing.

OK so this is totally off-topic. My point is, if you don't have the capital of Google, or their 30-level thinking, charge money! You can make a really good income. :)

Did you know they used Goog-411 to collect spoken phonemes to improve their auto-captioning of YouTube videos (so they can search them)?

Source?

LMDDGTFY:

http://lmddgtfy.com/?q=goog-411+phoneme&v=

LMGTFY:

http://www.google.com/search?q=goog-411%20phoneme

also, the picture was gross

It's nutella!

Nutella is delicious! It's a chocolate hazel-nut spread. :)

Hehe, I figured it wasn't actually feces, but the picture plus title put me off a bit :)

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