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Would you pay for more on the internet?

XZeroII

XZeroII

Lifer
MSNBC

Ok, I realize that AT charges for a premium service and whatnot, but how far are you willing to go? What if you had to pay $5 a month to access 10 different services on the internet, plus your normal internet bill? That amounts to a lot of money per year. Personally, I think that paying $50/month for broadband is bad enough and while it may seem reasonable to pay $5-$10/month for one service, once you subscribe to a few, the bills start piling up. This is not a rant about AT's subscriber thing. It's about subscriptions in general.
 
I think bandwidth costs will shrink to near zero over time and we will be nickeled and dimed to death with all sorts of ancillary service fees
 
There's two ends of the bills here though.

There's the downstream that you more or less pay for, and then there's the upstream that the websites have to pay for. When you've got even as little as 100 people on a high bandwith connection like a cable modem, pulling off a site hosted on a T1, you are seriously starting to suck that bandwith dry on websites side of things. Now, just imagine that it isn't 100 people on that site trying to pull stuff down, but THOUSANDS...

Bottom line is, you think that $40 is expensive to you. Try stepping into the websites shoes and see how it feels when you have to sign over that check for 3 or 4 T1's at $600-$1200 a pop a month, plus the router costs, and the support costs, and the server costs, and the software costs to run the apps, and the money it costs to pay the employees and keep the electricity running.

Face it. So long as consumers keep getting faster for less, the websites are going to have to keep charging more to keep everyone happy, and the bandwith free flowing.
 


<< I think bandwidth costs will shrink to near zero over time... >>

Sure, and PC's are just a fad. lol!

I have never nor will I pay to subscribe to anything on the internet, unless it is something like a bill-paying service, trading stocks, online banking, etc. I might pay a fee to access professional oriented research websites like some medical or legal library, but never for entertainment purposes. There are PLENTY of fun things to do for free.
 


<< In January, AOL?s Robert Pittman told analysts at an investor conference in Scottsdale, Ariz. that he wanted to increase the revenue from its average online customer to a whopping $159 a month. Right now, that revenue stands at $24 per customer per month. >>



Will someone let be borrow a clean pair of Steel-toed boot ... SO I CAN KICK THIS BASTARDS TEETH IN!!!!!!😀


I'm sorry, I'm just having a pickle of a day...a 24 hiur snafu if you will, and my last never is stretched thin.....
 


<< I think bandwidth costs will shrink to near zero over time... >>

Sure, and PC's are just a fad. lol!
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Actually, this is not such a strange idea. The ancillary services are where most of the money is made. lorl!
 


<< In January, AOL?s Robert Pittman told analysts at an investor conference in Scottsdale, Ariz. that he wanted to increase the revenue from its average online customer to a whopping $159 a month. Right now, that revenue stands at $24 per customer per month. >>


What's this guy been smoking?

I don't pay for content and it's not likely I ever will. I'm pretty sure there will always be enough free content online in my lifetime to keep me happy.
 
I sooooo agree with you.

I started a paramedic club on Yahoo! in 99 and it has about 300 members right now. Recently Yahoo! changed these clubs to groups (whatever that means). The bandwidth has been pinched to nothing and they added advertising to the messages area. I have gotten over two dozen emails from Yahoo! telling me that members have dropped the group. If I was not the founder I would be with them too because the response time dropped to nothing, if available at all.

I know it is a free service, much like ATOT, but they make money from marketing our profiles. I have seriously thought about cutting all ties with Yahoo! lately.

If eekers were here, I would like to think that this would be...
 


<< Actually, this is not such a strange idea. The ancillary services are where most of the money is made. lorl! >>

If you mean that websites will "hide" the costs of bandwidth in the fees of their ancillary services, exactly as Yahoo is doing now, that may be, but Yahoo isn't an online service provider nor do they own backbone infrastructure, they lease it.

Bandwidth and access to it will never be "near zero", someone will have to pay for it, and that cost will be passed to the end user. AOL could say that their customers are paying nothing for internet access or bandwidth, what they're paying for is "content" and we both know that would be a lie since a good portion of the fee for that "content" is really going to cover the expenses of serving it (bandwidth).
 
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