Monday, 16 March 2009

How long will Gmail be free?

I've just totted up 30 pieces of software that I use at least weekly which have cost me absolutely nothing. In particular I have my Gmail account open just about every moment of the day, so the recent service problems hit me hard. It made me think about how much we can rely on free stuff, and how much I take for granted what I routinely get for nothing.

Although many of these tools may offer upgrades, add-ons or be linked to things I have paid for, I am using all of the following absolutely free of charge:

  • Blogger
  • Doodle.ch
  • Drupal
  • Evernote
  • Facebook
  • Feed My Inbox
  • Feedburner
  • Firefox
  • Flickr
  • Flash player
  • Flock
  • Gmail
  • Google custom search engine
  • Google groups
  • Google maps
  • Google search engine
  • icanhaz
  • Linkedin
  • Mediawiki
  • Quicktime player
  • Skype
  • TinyURL
  • Twitter
  • WikiPedia
  • Wordpress
  • Yahoo! Search Engine
  • Yahoogroups
  • Youtube
Most have a single function, but they get used at least monthly, whilst some are built into to other tools, such as Flash Player, so I hardly know I'm using it. And then there's Gmail and Flock (a Firefox-based browser) which is open just about every minute I'm online, which is close to 10 hours on a working day. And I'm sure many other people use a lot more.

Bear in mind that I didn't include my free Flickr because I also have a $25 Flickr Pro account, or 'other people's blogs', which save me money on magazines. Think of the time and effort invested in publishing useful information without any thought of charging for it. Or RSS, which is a vital part of my networked world - if it had been invented by Microsoft it could easily have needed a licence to be built into someone's website.

And I didn't count any BBC stuff, especially iPlayer and news, because I pay for a TV licence. There is also a lot of technical stuff that I can't see but that I know is important to SCIP's work, such as open source server tools which we use for hosting sites. Or my free iPhone apps, some of which I use regularly.

But how long will they be free?
I'd been thinking about free stuff not just because I wanted to point you at useful stuff [although I have only listed things I use regularly and would endorse] but because I was wondering whether the credit crunch presented a threat to my new way of working.

Do they rely on income from advertising to remain free? If so I can only see a downturn in advertising spend in 2009, and perhaps a corresponding decline in free services. Even the mighty Google's income remains firmly linked to turnover in online advertising, and is currently tightening its belt as the squeeze continues. Imagine paying for searches. And GMail is suffering some servcie problems which have underlined the problems in relying on a single provider for a vital service such as email.

Some of these tools are free because I can choose to pay for an upgrade. I'm typing this in the excellent Evernote, for example, which offers a generous free monthly limit - I can upload 20,000 text notes - but has cheap paid-for features which I may find useful in future. It's business plan probably relies on a small percentage of people paying for a service which it can offer for free to millions. Whilst this is based on the very low margins for each free customer there will be some fairly hefty bills coming in each month and it will need to begin seeing some income at the end of the tunnel if it doesn't want it's banks or backers breathing down its neck in the next few months.

And Evernote is a tool that's been round for a while and may well be backed by bigger fish or have a more substantial base of paying clients than, for example, Twitter, which, as far as I can tell, has no paid for features. This free service allows people all over the planet to post short messages that can be shared with thousands of other people. Like text messaging crossed with email groups crossed with blogging. I can't believe any users would say that it has reached mission-critical status, but even minor drops in service cause howls amongst millions of current users.

Will we see a shift in the charges for services as the crunch bites? Or more and more open source as the market for software dries up?

Posted by mark at 22:35

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1 comment:

Helen said...

Great Article Mark,

Id like to think that the new evolving and sophisticated online Tracking Services available today that allow marketing depts to target their audiences much more 'meaningfully', will make online advertising much more powerful than it has ever been to date.
These Tracking Services create more value for money for the advertiser. Additionally the services you speak of have been growing substantially in subscribers over the past months/years, therefore making advertising on them far more attractive/lucrative, as a result (it is hoped) this could create enough revenue for them to preserve the free features of their services.

I for one hope that these invaluable and innovative services remain free, especially as Schools seem keen to start opening up their networks and using them as creative educational resources.

Long live free web 2.0 services

Helen Goss

17 March 2009 at 11:31

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