Re:How AltaVista, the first good search engine, fell into th...
by true_religion on Saturday December 19, 2020 @11:57AM
(#25478774)
I agree there are too many $5 services, but a search engine is something that I use every waking hour of my day. I get so much use from it, that $5 per month is a bargin.
I would definitely pay Google just to be able to remove some sites permanently from my results. They're just spam to me, even if Google thinks they are legitimate.
Re:How AltaVista, the first good search engine, fell into th...
by freedomben on Saturday December 19, 2020 @12:07PM
(#25478885)
Yes, exactly right. If people are paying any amount at all they expect it to work and work perfectly. I'm not saying that's unreasonable, but it does quickly become unfeasible at scale with users who have no training at all.
Then on top of that the skimming the payment processors do makes a large percentage of that $1/month go to transaction fees. Charging yearly helps with that but many people won't want to do that.
Re:How AltaVista, the first good search engine, fell into th...
by Closi on Saturday December 19, 2020 @12:22PM
(#25479062)
Facebook makes $50 per user per year, so I would assume $1 per month is an order of magnitude less than what google is making from you at the moment.
$10 per month is probably more realistic.
The problem with this model, though, is support. A service with 100 million untrained end users each paying a dollar will need to provide quality customer service to 100 million untrained end users. It is much easier to sell ads to 10,000 "affiliates" who feel that they have some special arrangement and thus accept some responsibility of their own, and make $10,000 off each of those.