How to stop smoking: Making Money Online Easy

Being smart online consumers doesn’t mean being cheap

If there is one constant in our online world it is the whining and moaning from old media, and to a growing extent new media, about how they are losing money because consumers don’t want to pay the same price for electronic versions of goods as they do for the actual in-hand physical version.

In fact there is a post currently on Fast Company titled Internet Users Still Cheap, Spend Only $1 to $10 on Digital Content, and while it might be a great pageview grabbing headline I find it rather insulting. In the post Austin Carr writes:

The digital marketplace is the likely savior of most industries. That is, if consumers are willing to spend money on the web. Do we expect too much for free online?

Sorry but it’s not just a matter of wanting everything for free, even though that is still a driving factor, but rather, I believe, that the consumer understands a very fundamental difference between online electronic versions of physical goods and the goods themselves – it’s availability.

You see when you walk into a store to buy a product you can see that there are only so many of copies of the item that is available. Whether it be a movie DVD, a game, a book or any item that is inherently available in electronic form, the price of a physical version is based on the cost of actually manufacturing those physical copies and making them available.

Yet when you go to buy that online in its pure electronic form those incurred costs change, and change radically. The consumer almost instinctively gets this and that is something that content producers continually try to ignore. The reality is that online electronic goods shouldn’t cost the same, or in some cases more than their brick and mortar equivalents.

Online consumers aren’t cheap. If they were businesses like Amazon or even the many t-shirt businesses would be able to stay in business. The consumer is smart enough to know that a physical product, whether it be a t-shirt, or a book, or even a physical copy of a movie or music album, has a cost to produce and are more than willing to pay those prices.

So when a consumer turns around and says that they don’t want to pay physical goods prices for the electronic versions they aren’t being cheap and to suggest otherwise is insulting their intelligence. They are however more than willing to pay what they consider to be a fair price as long as you make it easy for them.

According to the affidavit, the investigation included the co-operation of authorities in Canada, France and Germany.

As for code, the LOIC DDoS software believed to be used by Operation Anonymous remain available on the social code site Github and on SourceForge. Thousands of people have downloaded it from those sites. The software allegedly makes it easy for a user to donate their computer's bandwidth to repeatedly messaging a target server until it is rendered inaccessible by other users.

The ephemeral group Anonymous, or Operation Payback, co-ordinated a series of such attacks earlier this month against Paypal, Mastercard, Visa and others. These global leaders in money transfer were criticized for preventing their customers from donating money to the controversial website Wikileaks, despite the site having been convicted of no crimes.

Clearly a sufficient number of people in the FBI believe the denial of service attacks may constitute felony-level damage to computer systems, but others have argued that the campaign falls broadly within the tradition of non-violent civil disobedience and political protest.

FBI Agent Allyn Lynd, whom The Smoking Gun reports signed the affidavit, has been in the technology news media before. He lead a 2009 raid on at least two Texas web hosts over an alleged federal crime concerning unpaid bills to AT&T and Verizon. Those raids disrupted a number of co-located but unrelated businesses, including some that allege the disruption cost them millions of dollars.

In this latest affidavit, Lynd argued again that he may need to disrupt some other servers temporarily in order to achieve his goal of determining which servers were relevant to his investigation. Due to the document's incomplete publication, whether any sense of irony was appreciated is unclear.

No information has been made available to date regarding any FBI or other law enforcement investigation of the denial of service and other technical attacks made against the Wikileaks website.

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Thursday 13 January 2011

Making Money Online Easy

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