Less services

We are about to loose the internet as a useful tool.

OK, this opener might be a bit dramatized, but it works well as an opener. During the last years I saw the internet changing. That is not surprising, since it is supposed to change all the time. New services open up and old and (mostly) obsolete or non-profitable websites shut down. So far, so good. This has happened before and will continue to happen.

Looking back about the last ten years some new websites have arrived: mentioning Facebook, YouTube, Google, Instagram. Most of those sites by now have reached quite a power in terms of people counted as members and influence on everybody’s daily life.

There are more similarities those services have: they are initially free of charge and they support a kind of what is being called social network. Meet and find you friends there and have fun. This enables people to stay in contact with each other and to a certain degree satisfy some voyeurism as well, why else should I follow celebrities or my neighbour, though I do not really know or like them? Though there is no direct monetary feedback from those services, people like them and get used to them. They support meeting functions, publish events and inform about things in life.

There is a saying “If a service is free, you are the product”. Most of the free services base their business model on selling information about their members to marketing companies, share their images and all other information and connection between those. Since they are not selling anything to their members, this is the only way for them to make money.

Naturally this is following a trend where more and more information needs to be collected, gathered, connected and target to the other paying customers (the marketing companies). If you want to make more profit, this is the only option to take.

Following the development on e.g. YouTube you can see that initially you could just upload your video and everybody could watch it. With the inevitable growth of the platform, more places must be found. Based on the business model they need to show commercials. What started with banners (that got blocked by more and more users after a while), commercials are now integrated into the “main-product” (the video) itself. This leads to a commercial break between every single video you might want to watch. Clicking actively on links makes it worse, since the user activity just triggers more videos being show (and therefore more return from the paying marketing companies).

The original service - the video platform - turns into something where the user is bothered with commercials that hardly can be avoided. The usefulness, that originally made it easy to use, turns against the service itself.

This seems to be a common trend, where a new service shows up, gets popular and then looses attractiveness when trying to turn that into too much profit. The connection between running a free service that somehow needs to be financed and increasing to a higher profit shoots the service at the end down.

Coming back to the example of YouTube my personal opinion tends more and more towards that the service they provide has become unusable. Whenever I find myself there looking for a specific song or redirected there for watching a video, the constant flow of breaks reminds me what I dislike the at the first place. Recently I start wondering if the video is worth watching at all or if I should just avoid the distraction and save my time.

Websites running a service half way payed and half way free seem to have a better usability and to be more focused on the user in a positive way. I am thinking about Github here for instance.

But the trouble here is as well to find the balance between being compelling enough for the broad mass of users to use the free-of-charge service and still have more features in your pocket to actually make them paying customers as well. The turn from with to against your members (or customers) might be slower if not stop at all then.

I admit that I do not have that insight of Facebook or Google+, therefore I can not evaluate the usability in comparison with the amount of commercials on their platforms. The only thing I see is e.g. Facebook redefining its user-policy every couple of months, granting new rights and rarely to the benefit of the platform members and some data protection organizations complaining about it. But as mentioned: I do not have first hand experience here. If any would like to provide an opinion about that, I would be glad to hear about it.