It seems as though everywhere you turn on the 'Net these days, somebody is offering you a free ride. Free email, free online content, free Internet access, free computers — nowhere else can you find such a veritable cornucopia of something-for-nothing.
Of course, it should come as no surprise, few if any of these things are really "free." While it's true the customer will pay little if anything, sponsors underwrite the costs. In turn, they get to market their own products or services to users of the no-charge service. It's a business model like broadcast TV: advertising pays the bills.
Americans have grown accustomed to the idea of advertising being used to pay for the cost of everything from park benches, to the nightly news, to prisons. Most agree it's a little distasteful. But we've come to accept it as a fact of life, nonetheless.
Still, we call the Internet the "New Media," don't we? The old way is to have a sponsor behind every news story and an ad on every page. But doesn't the new, online economy deserve better? Maybe we should start viewing the New Media as an opportunity to not make the same old mistakes.
Right now, the vast majority of online services are at least partially underwritten by advertising. If you use Web-based services like Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail, you see ads whenever you read email.
Even the latest version of Qualcomm's Eudora email software defaults to a sponsored mode. Banner ads top the pages of every major online content provider, as well as smaller ones, including some homegrown "amateur" sites.
Even Apple Computer, which has long milked mileage out of its tie-dye-and-granola image and its focus on the education market, is getting in on the desktop advertising act.
The Mac OS's Sherlock search utility integrates banner ads right into its search results; and for searches that don't return ad content, Apple fills the space with its own ads for new products. This software was touted as one of the major features of Mac OS 9.
One of the newest "free" deals to hit the Internet market is FreeDSL.com, a new venture offering customers high speed Digital Subscriber Line connections at no charge. FreeDSL users must agree to leave a Web browser window open at all times, displaying a constant stream of advertising by the service's sponsors.
They must also allow their browsing habits to be monitored, with the aim of compiling statistical profiles of their Internet usage. FreeDSL will then lease these profiles to advertisers looking to better target their marketing.
But will it work? To be sure, this isn't the first time anyone's offered no-cost Internet access. But previous offers have always been for dial-up connections, using a modem and a normal phone line.
By comparison, DSL involves fairly expensive equipment and setup costs, both to the consumer and to the telco offering the service. Often the service provider doesn't expect to recover the installation costs for a year or more. It's this harsh reality that has many analysts wondering whether FreeDSL's business model will ever break even.
In fact, we've seen this type of plan fail before. Free-PC is just one example of how a subsidized business model is no guarantee of success. The venture offered 10,000 selected applicants a free Compaq computer, provided they would submit to a barrage of advertising while the machine was in use.
The experiment barely lasted nine months before Free-PC merged with eMachines and the program was scrapped. (The Free-PC guinea pigs got to keep their Compaqs, though.)
One problem the industry faces is how tough it is to gauge just how successful an online ad campaign really is. Web advertisers and publishers talk about the success of a banner ad in terms of "click-through," or the ratio of the number of times the ad is viewed vs. the number of people who actually click on the ad to go to the site it promotes.
It's a well-known fact in the industry that overall click-through rates have been dropping steadily since banner ads were first introduced years ago. Consumers just don't seem to be responding to the ads in ways advertisers would hope for.
Other media have been successfully supported by advertising for years — television and magazines, for example. So why is the Web proving more difficult?
Part of the reason may simply boil down to a difference in format.
While TV or magazine ads often fill an entire page or your whole screen, banner ads are relegated to just a small portion of overall screen real estate. And while traditional ads interrupt TV programs, few Web surfers would want to interrupt their news article on purpose, by clicking on a banner ad.
One solution for advertisers might be a more pervasive, overall sponsorship approach. Large, brand-conscious corporations like Coca-Cola or Time-Warner could underwrite an entire site, rather than just one small corner of the screen.
In that way, advertisers could be less concerned with click-through and concentrate more on surrounding the entire user experience in their brand identity.
But is that really what we want? I, for one, don't relish the idea of omnipresent mega-brands being plastered over every surface and channeled through every electronic medium. If I want to send email to my family, for instance, the idea that I can't do it without being confronted by corporate marketing is a little disturbing.
And remember, it's a World Wide Web, not just one for the United States. Do we really want to be best known for our culture of advertising?
In this society, we tend to talk about advertising being a "necessary evil." But in the case of the Internet, is it really "necessary" if it's not paying the bills anyway? Maybe it's time to think of other alternatives.
One possibility might be subscription services. The model works for other media. A lot of people think HBO is worth paying for, for example, so long as it carries unedited movies and programming like "The Sopranos."
But to succeed, HBO needed to overcome consumer resistance to its new business model. Just as television had traditionally been broadcast free-of-charge until the advent of premium cable channels, most of us are still locked into the idea that the Web should be available to us at no cost.
It's the same kind of mindset that keeps us from supporting public television, even after watching a week's worth of a program like Ken Burns's The Civil War.
Subscription models have traditionally been difficult to sell to the public in the Web space. But maybe the problem isn't with the way those services are marketed, but with the way we think about the Internet in general.
Is there nothing on the Web you'd pay for, if it meant you could get quality content, free of advertising?
Of course, for most of us the answer is probably "yes" — but with "quality" being the operative word. A service provider who could offer both reasonably-priced Internet access and high-quality, exclusive, advertising-free online content would certainly have a unique value-add when compared to its competition.
But so far, even as the overall volume of content on the Internet increases, that kind of quality seems ever harder to come by.
So, until someone figures out a better way that actually delivers, it seems we're stuck with our old-school advertising-subsidized content model. Too bad because on today's "free" Web, all too often it seems you get just what you pay for.
