Delving into the Commercial P2P World 45
Anonymous Coward writes "PBS has an interesting look at the emerging commercialized P2P networks brought to light by Cringely. With the news of Sky's default bundling of commercial P2P applications in its broadband software, many users seemed to be against the idea of getting nothing from providing Sky with their upstream bandwidth for free. Meanwhile, PeerImpact, seems to be rewarding users for their P2P system through PeerCash, and GridNetworks is building an system called PeerReward."
Re:Not a bad idea (Score:3, Insightful)
Cash, Reward, Save (Score:5, Insightful)
Peer Impact = Doomed (Score:2, Insightful)
If only they had the money to advertise heavily they'd have a shot. Also, it might help if they were more low-key about all the "Earn money!" stuff because while that brings evangelistic eyeballs it doesn't make for a community of anything more than rabid, greedy Amway-types who bitch about being poor.
They've been around for awhile now and they have a slick web forum application integration, but their forums aren't active at all beside noise like "how much money have you made?". Shame really.
To have a downloadable app that people crave you have to give people something for free. Giving the impression that a primary draw is to earn free money while half-way marketing it as an "iDownloads"-type store... not gonna work.
Hehe, it's amusing that they named their link promotion scheme "Noisemaker" links.
Re:commercial p2p is a commercial failure (Score:1, Insightful)
Or maybe they didn't want DRMed horror movies.
Commercial P2P is like... (Score:3, Insightful)
...buying a new car with the caveat you have to drive Stan, the guy at the service desk, to work every other Thursday.