By Sushila Nair, Product Manager, Managed Security Solutions Group, BT Global Services, CISSP, CISM, CISA, PCI QSA
One of the challenges for Internet companies is to make a profit by providing content and services to a community that largely expects those services or content to be free. There was a time when organizations charged for providing email. Remember MSN and AOL? Fast forward a few years to an unlimited number of free email services. Not only is the expectation that the service be free but users moved to other e-mail providers when storage limits or functionality was restrictive. Free and unlimited is just what our community expects.
Last year, Rupert Murdoch announced News Corp. will start charging for online access to its news services. It will be interesting to watch how this fares for consumers who are used to receiving free services. News Corp. is also suggesting it will charge search engines for the ability to crawl through its sites. Services that are not free need to distinguish themselves as being remarkable to ensure a community that is used to no charge will be willing to pick up a tab.
Similarly, there has also been a shift by almost all of the free online services to start charging for premium services to reduce dependence on online ad revenue. For example:
- LinkedIn has introduced a paid tool that can be used by recruitment companies
- Skype is now started charging for voice mail
- Panadora has introduced a paid online radio service with no advertisements
There is no doubt during the next two years, we will see many more companies actively moving towards a paid model with earnings supported by advertising revenue. However, even as companies look for ways to earn direct revenue for some aspect of service, the question becomes, “What should we expect for the free services that are used to reel consumers in?”
The loss of our SecureThinking blog this past month, which was being hosted for free, brought forward these questions of what our right to availability really is. What does our loyalty and presence entitle us to? What are fair expectations for free services? It appears that free entitles us to a service without support.
Organizations that provide services like blogging, social networking and online applications are all mostly free. Consumers expect these services to be reliable, secure and constantly available. But is this expectation too high? Are we losing high value services because we do not want to pay for Internet services and content?
Certainly our desire for free services and content is negatively impacting notable TV, entertainment and newspaper companies. When we have no more credentialed journalists because we did not want to pay for their time, I wonder if the value of the content we will be accessing will decline. Is our lack of desire to pay actually killing the golden egg? After all, there is an intrinsic cost in supplying a product.
If you are providing a product and building a business model around charging for additional services, I believe the service you are supplying must be indicative of the quality of the product you paid for. The product must provide its users with confidentiality, integrity and availability. How will we know that the paid product has these qualities? Organizations that provide a multi-level service model, service levels for paid services and no service level for free are at risk of alienating the community they initially attracted by providing the service in the first place.
In our situation, our response has been to move the SecureThinking blog to a new platform that we host and pay a small fee to use. There was a misalignment between our expectations and the supplier’s product, but that is often the case when a product is free.
I’d be interested to hear your feedback on whether you think free services should be held to the expectation of secure and reliable. What do you think?
How do these companies claim to have free services? Then charge when you get to end of the pages. To me this completely false advertising.