Love free Web 2.0 sites? Then pay for them
Steve Dembo,
Teach 42,
Aug 18, 2010
Here's my confession: I do pay for some online services. The biggie is my web hosting, where I store this newsletter and all my personal sites, for with I pay $120 a month. Yes, a lot - but I need the bandwidth, and NRC won't pay. But I also pay for some other things. Flickr, for example, has been a regular recipient of my $25 or so a year for the last several years. I also pay Major League baseball for audio feeds of all its baseball games (though I am sad to report that this feed - and especially the iPod edition - is very unreliable). I've also sent money to various musical artists for 'free' content, because I wanted to encourage them to post more. I've supported publications like Rabble in the past (though my current subscription is lapsed, sorry guys). So, OK, I get paying for stuff. But what content providers have to realize is that my discretionary spend - like everyone else's - is very limited. You can't all get $100 a year, or even $6.00 a month. There's too many of you.
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