Breaking Down the Game Film – Voting with Your Dollars
02 Feb 2010“Breaking Down the Game Film” is a term commonly used to analyze tape from an already played sports game to dissect what went right and what went wrong. In this series I’ll be taking published articles from around the web and break them down.
Topic: Voting with Your Dollars
Article: “Will Anyone Pay for Anything”
Author: Guy Kawasaki
Links: https://www.openforum.com/idea-hub/topics/the-world/article/will-anyone-pay-for-anything-guy-kawasaki and video http://www.building43.com/videos/2009/07/24/will-anyone-pay-for-anything/.
Guy’s article sums up the video nicely, but I highly suggest watching the video just so you can hear what the panelist say with your own ears.
In the event you are short on time, I’ll save you the click through to the article and the video and sum them both up here:
Guess what teenagers and twenty-somethings are willing to pay for online?
NOTHING!
There were only two services any of the panelists were willing to pay for:
- Gmail
- Xbox Live
Facebook, Twitter, YouTube…they won’t pay for any of them. This panel never clicks on banner ads, and if any of the services started charging them money to use them they would move on to find a new service to meet their needs.
Millions of users, and Facebook might loose them all if they ever wanted to charge money.
That is scary.
It turns out developers of all ages are not too different, well, it appears we don’t click on ads at least, as Jeff Atwood laments, http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/11/our-amazon-advertising-experiment/,
If Stack Overflow, a site that does a million pageviews a day, can’t make enough from AdSense to pay even one person half time — and let me tell you, that’s being overly generous based on the actual income it generated — how does anyone make a decent living with AdSense?
Thus, teenagers, twenty-somethings, and developers don’t click on ads on the Internet.
I then asked myself two questions:
- How does anyone stay in business online?
- What would I pay for online if it wasn’t free?
Question one has a myriad of answers that I won’t dive into in this post. With question two I spent a few minutes and came up with this list:
- Gmail – Nope, I would put up my own email server if push came to shove. I already have one on standby just in case. Better safe than sorry, :-).
- Xbox Live – This I do pay for, mainly because there is no alternative to play the Xbox online.
- Facebook – Gone.
- Twitter – Gone.
- Flickr – I have already moved to Facebook. See above for how I feel about paying for Facebook.
- Stackoverflow – Tougher decision, however there are too many free alternatives out there to fill the void. Right now when I Google a programming question I’m still finding plenty of links to non-Stackoverflow sites with very good answers. Someday, but right now, it is a no.
- Google Reader – Plenty of alternative RSS readers.
- All of the feeds in my Google Reader – There isn’t a feed/website in my reader that I couldn’t live without.
- Google – Would I pay for Google? Again, there are too many free alternatives.
It would be painful to move, change, or lose any of these services/websites, but not painful enough to pay any amount to continue to use them.
Scary thought.
Or…
What happens in a world where no one pays for anything and you are the one person who will pay for something?
You might just get everything you ever wanted.
Look at the cartoon Family Guy, from our friends at Wikipedia:
Shortly after the third season of Family Guy aired in 2001, Fox canceled the series. However, favorable DVD sales and high ratings for syndicated reruns convinced the network to renew the show in 2004.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_guy
Family Guy was dead in the water, with no hope to ever see the light of day again. Then, something crazy happened. People voted with their dollars, bought the DVDs like crazy, and watched all of the reruns over and over and over again. Fox woke up, picked the series back up, and Family Guy is entering it’s 8th season.
I’ve decided to start “voting with my dollars” online by monetarily contributing to the following projects that create the plug-ins I use on my blog:
- SEO - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/
- Site Map Generator - http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/
- Google Analytics - http://ronaldheft.com/code/analyticator/
- Database Backups - http://ilfilosofo.com/blog/wp-db-backup/
- Caching - http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/
I also purchased an iPhone game I normally wouldn’t have, but I bought it based on the author’s excellent blog posts. Check out Monkeys in Space from Streaming Colour: http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/2009/09/22/monkeys-in-space-escape-to-banana-base-alpha/ and check out Owen Goss great iPhone development blog at http://www.streamingcolour.com/blog/.
It is my hope to continue to support developers and their projects by contributing to them on a regular basis to further their development.
Next time you find a project, blog, or application you really enjoy I urge you to support it. By voting with your dollars we have a lot more power online than we realize to influence what survives and what withers.
It is time we all start voting with our dollars!