stop your moaning (a moan about moaning)

The internet is full of cool, free stuff for you to play with. Some of it is made by cool geeks who don't want anything in return, some is made by businesses who claimed your soul in their terms agreement. A few are cool geeks who becamse businesses that had to make money, and therein lies a problem.

How do you go from being some guy in his (or her, whatever) room, to some guy in a small office, to 400 guys in a crazy loft in San Francisco smashing their heads against the wall trying to figure out the least offensive way to make money from this brilliant thing they've created.

If it's not already obvious, this is loosely based on Twitter. Twitter always seems to have struggled with making money. Sure, you can sell search data to Google and Microsoft, but that money isn't going to cover everything. You could even get some investors to give you a boatload of money, but they're eventually going to want to see some sort of return.

Once you've exhausted those avenues, it's unfortunate but, you're going to have to turn to your users. This presents a problem. Users hate it when you make money from them. Even if it doesn't cost them anything at all. Show some adverts (some people - yes you, Gawker - take this way too far) and people moan that you've sold out. Start charging and you might as well have broken into someone's house and just started taking their stuff.

It must be incredibly frustrating when a bunch of people are selling an app to use your service and making decent money from it when you can't make income no matter what you try.

If it were me, I'd do what Facebook is trying to do. Get a load of businesses on board and promise them good advertising. When I say "good", I mean advertising that might actually work. When I use Facebook, I see ads for stuff that relates to what I talk about and what's in my profile. I probably see ads my close friends would see, too. That's the only way I can explain some of them! Facebook ads don't annoy me - I trust them. It's all based on things I willingly tell them, so why wouldn't I trust them? I'm a pretty reliable source when it comes to the things I like.

This seems to be what Twitter is doing. I don't know how much real value there is in trending topics. I think they're pretty useless, personally. As soon as something gets popular, it gets spammed and becomes pointless. Spam notwithstanding, there could be real value in selling trending topics. In order to do this, Twitter needs to put them in your face. They need them to be in pride of place on their website, on any native clients, anywhere. But doesn't it make people moan?! God, take away people's faces and their predisposition to whining about inconsequential shit goes through the roof, doesn't it? The entitled rage at the #dickbar in Twitter for iPhone is just mind-bottling. Seriously; 1. Who is really that angry about the #dickbar? 2. Is Twitter as a service not worth it? I mean, they've got to try and make some money, haven't they? If you're not going to visit any of that stuff, just don't. At least let them try to make money because, if they can't, the service will disappear. Sure, you'll move on, but Twitter is a job to some people and, as such, they rely on it to live.

Personally, I'm a fan of Freemium. Show ads, offer subscription. Remove ads if people subscribe. Replace one revenue stream with another. I happily subscribe to Instapaper (I would pay more for this) and Flickr (though I sense Yahoo! isn't long for this world, so we'll see what happens there) and I would pay for Twitter and Facebook, too. It wouldn't need to be a lot, either. Marco Arment charges $1 a month. With Facebook's 500,000,000 users or whatever it is, even if 25% of those people paid a dollar a month, that's a decent guaranteed income for just being yourself.

I realise that willingness to pay for a service puts me in the minority. You only have to look at App Store reviews to see that. Before I bought Tilt to Live for iOS, I was reading the reviews (of this 59p, 99¢ game that is fucking awesome, by the way. Seriously, you'll get your 59p's worth in the first hour of play) and people were outraged by the fact that One Man Left added a game mode and were charging the same again for the new mode. 59p that you don't even have to pay, and would-be 5-star reviews became 3, 2 and 1-star. Unbelievable.

I suppose what I'm getting at here is that people don't spend enough time looking at something's worth. If it's always been free or cheap, it should always be free or cheap. Nothing should ever change, even though your users don't pay, they're damn sure going to throw their toys out of the pram if you change anything and demand that you put it right-the-fuck back.

I say fuck that. The people who created this awesome thing that you love are probably only going to try to change it for the better. Even when they've got to start doing something a bit lame to make some money, they're going to do it in the best way they can. This isn't only so that they don't piss off their users, but so that they don't ruin the thing they created. Chances are, if you love it, the people who made it and spend their lives improving it love it way, way more and don't want to be the cause of it properly sucking. Stop fucking moaning about free things - this is the world; we've all got to make some money at some point.