1) Advertisers are paying. What troubles me about this model is that advertisers only continue to pay as long as their adverts perform. If the general public are trained to expect that everything is free, what can an advertiser sell to them?

This model applies obviously to Facebook. The main exception I can think of to this is Google Analytics, which is free but essentially exists to prove the efficacy of Google Adwords with the goal of selling more.

2) Other customers are paying. The Flickr / Basecamp model, where free provides a limited experience of a larger product. This may convert some people into customers, but in the meantime their experience is free. I quickly outgrew the free option in Flickr and went “pro”.

This also covers community software - anything from WordPress, MySQL to Linux. The additional products and services around the product pay for its upkeep.

3) Investors are paying - the Web 2.0 mug’s game.

See sites like YouTube and Twitter - a massive success, as long as you don’t define success as “making any money”. Sites like these generally remain free until they reach one of two outcomes:

a) The owners figure out how to “monetise” them (hideous word) in some way.
b) The site goes down in flames.

Personally, I don’t think *everything* on the web will *ever* be free. The web supports all kinds of models - free, paid, ad-supported etc and new models will continue to evolve.

And the worst about it is, the more well-known you become, the less time you have!

Hope to see you around…

@Mark: advertising really has only just started to break out into the wider web.

One example would be in-game music sales and advertising, and then there’s Google attempting to squeeze advertising into mobile phones. So there’s all kinds of revenue craziness going on.

And thanks for your comments…

I believe that we’ve only seen the beginning of the advertising supported software and service offerings. Indeed, it’s nothing new, but it has a stronghold on our society, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing.

The previous method of selling a box of software has perished. Offering ads to support them now or offering subscriptions is really the only thing that will allow them to survive.

Thanks for popping in to see what I’m all about - I’ve got a link to you now from my place (forgot to add it before going out to water the garden!).

All this web 2.0 stuff takes a lot of maintenance, doesn’t it? Since getting into blogging in a Big Way and discovering all the other socially interactive sites we simply have to join, I seem to spend much of my day adding links, checking on my Technorati and MyBlogLog pages, uploading photos to Flickr, commenting on other people’s blogs … if I ever get round to writing The Novel, it’ll be a miracle!

But I’m loving it all, though A whole new world is opening up to me!

Great site you’ve got here - I’ll be back as often as I can make it

It’s certainly an interesting topic, isn’t it?

Personally, I don’t foresee some point in the near future when all things on the web will be free.

Altruism doesn’t make too much business sense, and doing stuff for the fun of it isn’t much of an option, either!

But how fortuitous, since as we talk about a not-so-free web, Google go and buy FeedBurner, which was a shrewd move with all things considered.

I think the closest we’re going to get to free is very small payments, often referred to as either micro-payments or micro-transactions.

This can only really come into full force once the big guys at the top of the food chain offer more fine-grained services (I’m thinking about the Merchant Service banks, the payment gateways et cetera) which in turn enable those below them to offer similarly smaller, more byte-sized services for tiny amounts of money.

What we do know is, the present web is nowhere near the finished article…

Four annual subscriptions taken out in one month and costing around $90. That’s unprecedented for me! But it’s driven by the fact that I have a blog of my own to nurture and grow, the services for which I’ve paid have a definite, recognizable intrinsic value under these circumstances and the subscriptions seem to me to be reasonable.

There’s one more stat-collecting service I use that I haven’t subscribed to (preferring to stick with the restricted free service) because they’re asking around $45 a year, and that figure falls outside my current comfort zone for one service.

So will everything on the web one day be free? No - not while there are people like me willing to spend a little money for bits and pieces to use on their own blog projects. And nor should everything be free, really. I see no reason why apps developers shouldn’t recoup some of their creativity and investment of both time and money through subscriptions.