He makes tactic or business model seems academic. It takes a bit of both…

There was a post above that stated they were making $12K a month off ads, great for them, but in the scheme of things, that is chump change. Mediocre revenue, when your a business, $12K is not going to sustain growth in your business. A number of people here have mentioned the Google and TV models… great, but are they getting the hits that these companies are? In order to get BIG revenue from ads you need to have the eyeballs and the people clicking. Google and TV have the economies of scale and the distribution networks to do this, at great cost… 12K aint going to get you that pal… if it does I will eat my computer keyboard! Keep me posted…

I operate a site that is competing with free options. I don’t understand, in my line of work, why people would offer this type of service for free? What we do is get eye balls to people’s property, if you don’t charge for this service, firstly how do you pay for the high data costs of high traffic and secondly, how do you expose these properties to potential buyers? I know there are established sites and sites that can get good search engine results, but in the wonderful world of online media, if you don’t have the money to acquire the distribution networks, you remain a chump forever content to live the mediocre land of $12K a month with no real ambition.

Our site is new and yes we dont have many properties on there, probably because we are not prepared to give a service away for nothing… we hope that as it matures, we will have a viable and sustainable business.

While just expecting “Free” to be good enough to base a business model on is a poor idea. Free with value has worked for many styles of business.

Google was mentioned above. I was thinking more of all the radio and tv stations, that did quite well for decades. This style of business works off the ability to gain users and then sell access to them (ads, commercials).

Still, you need a product that draws more attention than your competitors for this to work. The internet is a tough place for this business model though. While there is a huge potential there is an endless supply of competitors looking to take your traffic.

Yesterday, The New York Times announced that it would be ending Times Select, its paid subscription services, and would refund money to those who had already paid. Today we take a look at that history of Times Select and the implications of the Times’…

“Free” is an amazing multi-billion dollar business model that has been proven time and again.

Television is “free”. Numerous newspapers and magazines are “free”. Google is “free”.

Eyeballs are worth an enormous amount and they always will be.

Anne, if your point is that 1) It takes a whole lot of eyeballs… and 2) reaching critical mass is expensive (and maybe not worth that expense)… then very good — a gold star for you. And welcome to the Internet. The rest of us have understood this since Web 1.0

To make the absurdly broad claim that it is silly to give away free content and services in an effort to gain traffic, marketshare, ad revenue and brand value — is to tell an entire multi-billion dollar industry that it’s m.o. should be re-thunk.

Bzzzt. Wrong answer. I’ll take my somewhat modest ~$12k per month that my blog spins off and quietly continue to pursue “free” as a business model.

Now… I’m going to scroll back up and click on some ads.

You spun around to contradict yourself in your penultimate paragraph, by admitting people aren’t the boneheads you imply. If you give away free content or membership in the (tactical)hope of earning revenue from advertising, that’s a business model. Whether it’s a viable one or not is another matter.