Image from epromos.com - Everyone Loves Free stuff
Times are tough and going to get tougher.
Business models are about to change.
Will the Free Model need to end?
Below Quote clipped from The Wall Street Journal April 27, 2009
Previously, Kodak just asked customers to buy something, without a minimum price requirement. “Some customers have ended up spending as little as 15 cents,” it said in a warning message. “The result: Our loyal customers who regularly shop the Gallery have essentially been subsidizing those who don’t.”
There’s been enough of a reaction, however, to prompt a letter from Victor Cho, Kodak Gallery’s general manager. “I recently received some strong responses from Gallery customers after we asked them to make a small purchase in order to continue enjoying photo storage benefits,” he wrote. “The fact is, we store billions of photos for our 75 million members. The quality storage service the Gallery provides is significant in terms of our business costs.”
David Lazarus, a columnist for the Los Angeles Times, cited the change as potentially the first of many online. “The culture of freeloading that has long defined the Web can’t last forever,” he wrote. Consumerist criticized Kodak as “overpriced,” then changed its mind because of Kodak’s additional features, including free downloads of photos in their original sizes.
What about the many photo-sharing sites, like Google’s Picasa and Yahoo’s Flickr, that are free? “Isn’t the point of uploading photos to the service to ’share’ them easily, not simply buy photos on a semi-regular basis? Doesn’t Kodak earn goodwill and branding impressions by constantly driving people back to their website to view photos? Isn’t disk space cheaper now than it has ever been,” Ian Schafer, chief executive of New York ad firm Deep Focus, asked in a blog post. “There’s an uproar brewing — and will be even louder once photos start getting deleted from the site, and people lose their memories forever.”
