Comment Re:Annoy by Design (Score 1) 156
Take your pick. The problem is that people tend to think of these services, especially within social media, as something other than a "product" with a shelf life. It's not like we make our lives available to our friends and extended family with the idea that it's 'only until the company can't make money any more and the service dies'. Anything on the web that survives for more than about a year, we tend to think of as "permanent"... but it never is. But honestly, the life cycle really seems to be:
- develop product
- release as free/no ads to increase demand
- slowly insert unobtrusive ads
- slowly insert obtrusive ads
- switch to "premium" version to remove ads
- premium version only removes some ads
- sell user data to highest bidder
- die a slow death
I'm not saying that I have any idea how to monetize the web, but I learned old-school marketing, which was #1 - never piss off your customers. #2 - Either you are ad-driven, or pay-for-service driven, but never both, because eventually you will go to far and violate rule #1. And then you're dead.