UPEI – BUS442.0

UPEI’s BUS442 class learning about Web 2.0 through exploration and participation.

Nothing these days is “free”

March 18, 2008

Chris Andersen’s Wired post really made me think. What exactly these days constitutes free? In my honest opinion, everything has a price, whether are not you are paying it directly or not.

It cannot be denied, the web is in a sense a commercialized gateway to the entire world. If you take the ability to make money off the world wide web, it falls apart. While many of us use services like Google or Gmail daily for free, SOMEONE out there in cyberspace is paying for our usage. It is the advertisers on Google that make it successful. If there are no advertisements, there is no income, and if there is no income, there is no money. If they have no money they can’t operate, and Google is dead. It isn’t free to run that company, their computing and intellectual resources cost millions of dollars yearly.

Google is a fantastic example. Likely millions of people use it daily, yet no one pays for the right to use it. For us, it is free, but that is just a benefit most of us take for granted in this Web 2.0 world we live in. We as a society need online commerce and business just as much as the companies who run the sites need it to reach their financial goals, because really these sites MAKE the world wide web what it is today.