Will anyone pay for anything?

http://www.building43.com/videos/2009/07/24/will-anyone-pay-for-anything/

by peter123 • 17 years ago

9 8 17 years ago

andreyf2• 17 years ago

I don't get this obsession with "free" stuff. I'm willing to pay for tons of stuff - Kindle books, blogs via Kindle, magazines, laptops, movies (when it's easier than torrenting), music (when it's easier than torrenting). The only reason I usually don't pay for things is when it's a pain in the ass to and or I don't want them enough. And it doesn't take a lot to make me want something enough to pay $10 or $20 or $30 for it - I impulsively spend that much on Amazon (usually without regrets) on book recommendations from blog posts or lectures.

Another example - I'll pay $100 for a good MySQL editor - one that gives me a visualization of my database (both schema and data), generates a human-readable schema representation of various revisions that I can keep in version control, generates SQL diffs of those revisions (both backwards and forwards), applies those diffs, and keeps my data when reverting. It isn't rocket science - I could hack together a bunch of scripts day, and debug it to stability over a month, that time is worth a lot more than $100 to me.

Give me something which seems worth paying for, and make it easy for me to pay you, and I will. Not rocket science.

kiba• 17 years ago

Younger people(like me) are highly sensitive to prices, because they don't have a high paying jobs like adults do.

andreyf2• 17 years ago

I'm not that old - 23. I agree that I was much more sensitive to prices during college, before I had a full-time job, but that's pretty natural for someone who doesn't have any money :-P

I suppose that does add a clause to the motto "make something people* want"...

* but not broke college kids

chaosmachine• 17 years ago

This video is an hour of Guy Kawasaki asking a panel of teenagers if they pay for any online products or services (no), if they ever click ads (only by mistake), and what they'd do if a free service started charging (switch to a free competitor).

aichcon• 17 years ago

When I was a teenager, and even when still in college, I had the same attitude, mainly because I had no money and I had lots of time (relatively speaking).

Now that I'm older I have a job, disposable income, and responsibilities that take up my time. I also have an appreciation for the work it takes to create anything of quality. So I am happy to give these people money if they satisfy a need I have and they satisfy it well.

As a developer myself, I think it also has to do with the fact that I hope people have the same attitude towards my product and are willing to pay for my product if they find it useful to them.

A similar example is music - I used to pirate 100% of it, but now that I understand that there is a person and a struggle behind each track, I happily purchase songs from iTunes and Amazon just to support the artist and keep them motivated to do more.

idlewords• 17 years ago

Thanks for taking that bullet for the rest of us. Why this stuff has to be in video form defies my understanding.

patio11• 17 years ago

And to think I could have written software for these people if I hadn't, in a fit of insanity, chosen a market full of gainfully employed professionals who are happy to pay for things which help them do their jobs faster and better.

hymanroth• 17 years ago

Contrary to most of the comments I've seen I thought the video was very interesting.

I'm quite surprised the kids were so willing to walk away from services like FB in which they have a lot of 'emotional capital' invested. I would have thought FB would have been 'stickier' given the photos, memories of shared events etc.

It would have been interesting to dig deeper and try and work out how much of this free web attitude is learned behavior. It's clear everyone expects to pay for internet access, telephony and cable. Is there not scope for 'teaching' people that a lot of the web just cannot be free over time?

Will anyone pay for anything?

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