The best bet for the rest of us is
to read all the pyramid schemes of the make money
fast kind, and then simply hold on to what we've got. If we're not
going to make money, at least we dont have to lose it, or throw it away.
I was under the apparently false impression that this
was pretty much common knowledge. And then I was approached by an otherwise
conservative (and elderly) member of my kibbutz with a question he hoped
I could answer for him.
The person in question edits a newsletter of English translations
from the Israeli press. Twice a month he chooses five articles of political
interest, translates them and types the translations up on his word processor.
After he prints out the new edition another elderly member of the kibbutz
mimeographs copies of the newsletter that get sent to about twenty subscribers.
The subscription fee is enough to cover the postage and paper expenses.
It is not a money making venture. It is, however, a very useful service,
and the subscribers are pleased with it. But maintaining a useful service
is apparently not enough.
The editor has an e-mail account, though he uses it very
rarely. Occasionally he sends a solicited translation to a politcal organization
which gets placed on the organization's web site. He sends the translation
as an attached document via e-mail, though just how he manages this is
beyond me since I've been enlisted by him numerous times to help out a
bit, and/or explain what he's doing wrong, and though sending an attached
document is a very simple procedure, it's hard for me to picture him doing
it successfully on his own.
But this time he didn't enlist my aid for technical assistance,
but rather to seek out my opinion. He had been in contact with his ISP
who had quoted him a price for a web site. He wanted to post his translations
on a web site, and wanted to know whether to my mind the price stated by
his ISP was logical. I, however, had difficulty understanding the price
estimate since, in addition to the cost of preparing and maintaining the
site, it included a cover charge for each subscriber up until fifty subscriptions.
After trying to make sense of this, and not exactly succeeding, I was informed
that his intention was to charge people for access to the site. Apparently
subscribers would receive a password which would permit them to access
the site. Relatively simple arithmetic was sufficient to figure out that
if the twenty subscribers moved to the online edition, saving postage and
printing costs, the money saved would be about equal to the price of maintaining
the site. Twenty subscriptions wouldn't be enough to make this a money
making venture - fifty might turn a small profit.
But I wasn't confused by the relatively simple arithmetic.
What confused me was the thought that this person viewed the internet as
fertile ground for a money making venture. Granted, he wasn't much of a
web surfer (frankly, I don't know what he did/does with this account),
and thus hadn't had much of an opportunity to see what happens on the web,
but if that was the case, why would he focus on the profit aspect of the
web rather than on the aspect of dissemination of information? Here was
a person who was offering information as a service, and since in its snail
mail version his newsletter was a labor of love that didn't turn a profit,
my assumption was that he would have wanted to use the internet to make
his information more readily available, oblivious to the profit aspect.
But I was wrong. He seemed to sincerely think that he
could make a profit. He even told me that he was considering making one
of the five translations from each edition available for free in order
to attract readers who would then subscribe in order to get the entire
newsletter. The well known adage so often quoted when referring to the
internet: "information wants to be free" simply wasn't part of his developing
internet ethos, though his was a classic case of where it should. I read
numerous magazine and newspaper articles on the internet that are made
available to me by various individuals and organizations, including publishers.
I have no doubt that all of them want to make a profit. But they apparently
also realize that the medium of the internet works by different rules than
those of the traditional information media - more along the lines of libraries
where information is made available to us as a service. (To tell the truth,
I don't know how public libraries operate. They certainly don't turn a
profit, and are dependent on taxes for their budgets.)
One magazine I read, both in the print and the bit versions,
is Wired. The bit version, free of
charge, is filled with much more information than the costly print version,
and also offers extensive hyperlinking and the opportunity to communicate
with other readers. The print version is a work of art that can be left
out on a coffee table, and I certainly won't belittle the importance of
that. One section of the bit version is called Brain Tennis where every
two weekd a debate on a chosen topic is conducted between two opposing
experts, each day a new response being added. In march of this year the
debate was on "Push Media". The debate was titled A
Dream Deferred. Julie Petersen, a veteran web site producer argued
for the traditional, "many-to-many" model of the web:
That's it for this edition. Reactions and suggestions
can be sent to:
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In Education - Main Page
From the Boidem -
an occasional column on computers and information technologies in everyday
life
August 23, 1997*:
Is the internet a good place to make money? Disregarding
for a moment the notion that the internet is a "place", anyone who follows
the literature is forced to admit that millions of dollars have so far
been invested in trying to prove that it is, though as yet unsuccessfully.
Companies with vast reserves can permit themselves the luxury of seeing
how much money they can throw away until just maybe they start making some.
If each of us makes the information we produce as a matter of course
- the things we have learned, the experiences we have had - available on
the Web, we can lend to each other an omnisciene unattainable prior to
the existence of the Internet. Using new-media tools, we can examine cross
sections of the human experience; track information across boundaries of
age, gender and culture; and manipulate the data in ways we never imagined.
The Web gives us an opportunity to transcend our limited sphere of knowledge
and grasp a deeper understanding of what it means to be human and to be
alive.
The person who approached me offers a valuable service. It
may not be something that has a mass appeal, but it doesn't need to be.
In its print version it's not a particularly costly endeavor, but it certainly
isn't profitable. It probably also goes the way of all paper. Perhaps each
edition passes from subscriber to friend to friend before it's either thrown
out or filed away, but even if the circulation is slightly larger than
the subscription list, it's not very large. An internet-based free version
would cost less to produce. At first it might not have much circulation,
but changes are good that a good deal more than twenty people are interested
in a service such as this, and that slowly but surely the readership would
grow. My friend still wouldn't be getting rich, but he would be offering
his small part to that previously unattainable omniscience, and that in
itself would be a very satisfying achievement.