Take My Money, Please

News stories say that ads for the X10 miniature camera are driving web users bonkers. If you surf fast, you can find yourself swatting down pop-up ads in the way you play a video game at the pizza parlor. You have to have great hand-eye-coordination (the supposed skill that video addicts always claim they are acquiring) just to keep up.

There's nothing wrong with advertising, of course. It's a great capitalist tool that allows us to get many things for free – network television, weekly newspapers, t-shirts from your local car dealer – that you would otherwise have to pay for. It keeps down the price of magazines and newspapers and provides important information to consumers as well.

But on the web, the relationship between advertising and real copy seems to be on the verge of becoming oddly unbalanced. We went from the absurd situation where everything on the web was free during the credit-fueled economic boom, to today where the price you pay for everything is a useless pop-up on your computer. National Review online clobbers every reader with an in-your-face pop up.

Look, I'm glad to pay for sites I like. But don't send me a spy camera. And, for god's sake, don't send me a subscription to National Review.

LewRockwell.com is mercifully free of all this. It's a site funded by a nonprofit organization, the Center for Libertarian Studies, which has donors. At some level, every person who writes for LRC is also a donor to the cause. The site is an act of charity not to mention brilliance.

That system works for this site, but it can't work for them all. Ever since for-profit sites realized that hits alone don't pay, they've been trying to come up with some other way.

The solution is so easy. The web needs to move toward fee-for-service, at every level. If you think about it, it is absurd that hotmail.com and yahoo.com offer their mail services and community services at no charge. The interfaces gets ever better looking and easier to use. And with local servers and hard drives now at intense risk for viruses and worms, storing files and email at one of these large providers is a great idea.

People love these services. Meanwhile, the companies that offer them are facing serious financial strains with lower and lower stock prices and all lending sources drying up. It make or break time for these folks. And all they can come up with is another gimmick to sell me a stupid camera or credit card, or fob off a copy of a credit-bureau report. Isn't the solution obvious?

Why the heck won't these people charge me? I would gladly pay for my hotmail account. I would shell out to keep my MSN community. I would subscribe to keep space on yahoogroups. Show me where to click and I'll do it. Millions of others will too. Imagine what kind of income these firms would enjoy if they started charging $10 per year per user for these services.

Why don't they? Perhaps they fear the wrath of java-heads and Linux-lizards who have been chafing ever since the web went commercial. Perhaps they fear that consumers would be upset, which they certainly would. But in a for-profit system that is losing money, all that matters is whether people are willing to shell out for your product.

We laugh at Salon.com and their magically evaporating funding and day-by-day collapse in quality. But give them credit: at least they were willing to test whether the users were actually willing to pay for what they offer. (They were not.) The same can be said of porn sites, which were confident enough in their marketability to mix up it up with the competition the old-fashioned way.

If MSN and Yahoo start charging, there will also be howls from the political left, which will announce that a free email account is a human right. We can look forward to all sorts of techie amendments to the UN Charter: “Consistent with human dignity and the right to communicate, the rights of all people to an email sending and receiving web-interface is hereby affirmed.”

But thank goodness nobody pays attention to the book-length list of rights pumped out by international social workers. The poor don't have a right to DVD players, CD burners, or woolen socks. And neither is there any right to a free space on somebody else's server. Let the poor of the third world lick stamps. Or perhaps Ted Turner will establish a fund to give cnnmail.com accounts to the multitudes.

Websites of the world, take our money. Demand our credit card numbers and paypal accounts. Make us pay. The glories of the web hang in the balance.

August 1, 2001