Google Considers 'Speciality' Subscriptions

jdclucidly writes "C|Net is reporting that Google is considering moving to a subscription based service for educational and commercial entities. The new service will be a specialized spider in addition to their already popular web search." Lexis-Nexis, Google's coming for you.

Slashdot Considers 'Speciality' Subscriptions

[flufffy]

According to this story [cnet.com] on CNET, anyway. Here's a taster:

Slashdot sees revenue in ads, fees

By Gwendolyn Mariano

Staff Writer, CNET News.com

October 25, 2001, 12:30 p.m. PT

Slashdot.org, the "news for nerds" Web site popular among software developers and Linux fans, said this week that it plans to use larger ads and offer a subscription service.

When Slashdot increases ad sizes, it plans to introduce a subscription service for people who want to pay for an ad-free version. Jeff Bates, who runs the site, said Thursday that Slashdot will launch the new ads and subscription service early next year. The cost of the service has yet to be determined.

"The larger ad formats are coming about really because, as Bob Dylan put it, 'The times, they are a'changing,'" Bates wrote in an e-mail interview. "While we'll still be mostly featuring the 468-by-60 banner, we're trying to work with our advertisers and see how we can work together. Rest assured though, we'll still be only having one ad per page."

Fly on the wall at Google

[Anonymous Coward]

A pointy-haired marketing boss meets with his crew: "Ok, team. A few days ago, one of the geeks pointed me to this story [slashdot.org] on Slashdot. After reading it and the comments associated with it, I realized that Google is missing out on the critical "search engines that suck" marketplace. As a result, many people are using our site, thus increasing our hardware and bandwidth costs. In an effort to reduce these expenses, and generate revenue, we need to come up with a way to make Google suck more. Any ideas?

Clueless Git #1: I'm thinking pop-up windows, and lots of them. Nothing sucks more than that!

Clueless Git #2: No, no, no. Pop-up windows have been done to death, and there are too many ways to disable them. We need something else; How about loading down the page with graphics and banner ads?

Clueless Git #3: Sure, that's going to suck, but people can always turn off graphics. We need something that will make the site not only more annoying, but also inherently less useful.

Clueless Git #2: How about switching the whole site to the Bulgarian language? That'd make it pretty much useless, everywhere except Bulgaria.

Clueless Git #1: No, it needs to be just useless enough that people won't use it, but with just enough value that we can charge people for it.

Clueless Git #2: I have an idea. Let's segment the index into narrow interest groups, and then charge people to use certain groups!

PHB: That's a fantastic idea! It's less useful, while giving the impression of added value. Make it happen!