I fol­low Mark Cuban’s blog and if you can get over the typos and poor gram­mar (not say­ing I’m per­fect) he has some valid points from time to time. He takes a real world busi­ness approach to Inter­net ide­al­ist top­ics like offer­ing every­thing for free. His series of posts a few weeks ago on ‘Free vs Freely Dis­trib­uted’ made sense to me since I had recently received an email from Tatango say­ing they would be dis­con­tin­u­ing their free ser­vice. Soon, I was get­ting more and more emails from my favorite free web ser­vices that said they were cut­ting back on what they used to offer for free.


Pan­dora had a huge win in an Inter­net radio roy­alty rul­ing but this also meant that they would have  “to begin lim­it­ing lis­ten­ing to 40 hours per month on the free ver­sion of Pan­dora”. If you go over the free 40 hours in a month it’s just $0.99 for unlim­ited lis­ten­ing for that month. I think that’s a great deal, espe­cially since I sit at a desk most of the day and can’t stand lis­ten­ing to my coworker’s idi­otic side comments.

My new favorite web ser­vice of the sum­mer has been Drop­box which allows you to store files online and sync them across mul­ti­ple com­put­ers. They sent me this email last night about changes they’re making:

The Drop­box team has been hard at work these past few months and we’d like to tell you about some upcom­ing changes and enhance­ments to the Drop­box service.

We’re Chang­ing Undo His­tory
Did you know that Drop­box automatically:

  • Safe­guards any files you delete in case you need to undelete them
  • Saves old file ver­sions in case you need to go back to them later

It’s like hav­ing “undo” for all your files and folders.

Today, Drop­box keeps these deleted files and old file ver­sions (“undo his­tory”) for­ever. For many peo­ple this cre­ates clut­ter, and it also wastes space.

Because of this, begin­ning August 1st, our new pol­icy will be to keep 30 days of undo his­tory.
…

I actu­ally had no idea about that fea­ture since I’m new to the ser­vice, but once again you can see they are scal­ing back the free ser­vice and push­ing the pre­mium sub­scrip­tions (freemium model).

The last email I received about “new poli­cies” was from Vimeo who start­ing August 1st will only keep your orig­i­nal video source file for one week after upload unless you become a Vimeo Plus mem­ber. I wasn’t as bummed about this one since I have only uploaded one video there to date. I may do more if I ever start edit­ing stuff I film with my Flip HD.

I’m not mad at any of these com­pa­nies for cut­ting back free ser­vices. I under­stand it costs money to offer them to peo­ple for no charge. SMS mes­sages are expen­sive and so is stream­ing music and pay­ing roy­al­ties. Hard disk space has become cheaper and cheaper but it still costs money. I don’t think any of these com­pa­nies are try­ing to force peo­ple into becom­ing pay­ing cus­tomers, they just can’t sim­ple take on the costs and sub­se­quent losses like Face­book and YouTube do.

Mash­able’s had a great arti­cle today that was very Mark Cuban-esqe talk­ing about how “free will not last for­ever”. It was less about how com­pa­nies can’t sur­vive giv­ing every­thing away for free, but more about how the end users are will­ing to pay for ser­vices if it’s bet­ter and eas­ier than the free alternative.

If users are per­suaded to sign up for a pre­mium account for Tatango, Pan­dora, Drop­box, or Vimeo, they’ll expect more whether it be more fea­tures or a more pol­ished expe­ri­ence. And if those users are will­ing to spend the money, they’re prob­a­bly going to shop around for some alter­na­tives where their money could go fur­ther. If they lose the func­tions they love the most about these ser­vices and don’t have the money, then they’ll find the next best free alter­na­tive or maybe get inspired to start their own ser­vice.

I’m lucky enough to have more dis­pos­able income to sub­scribe to more pre­mium ser­vices and buy more apps and soft­ware, and I think a lot of peo­ple are with me at least in their will­ing­ness if they don’t have the extra cash. (I mean who wouldn’t pay for Tweet­Deck?) All of this breeds com­pe­ti­tion which is great for me– the end user. I want the best of the best for as cheap as pos­si­ble and while that might not be free as often as it used to be, I should still be the one get­ting more out of it.