
Will anyone pay for anything? - peter123
http://www.building43.com/videos/2009/07/24/will-anyone-pay-for-anything/
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chaosmachine
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
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.

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

~~~
andreyf
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

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hymanroth
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?

