some random reflections of a "Python newbie": (1) books, and free sites

[Alex Martelli]

Robin Becker <robin at jessikat.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
4E1vGBAwowU4Ew+N at jessikat.demon.co.uk...
    [snip]
> >>how do people support 'free' sites? Via advertising?
    [snip]
> >Or they give away a basic service and hope to tempt you to buy
> >the "full" service pack. Or basic service is free, but any extras
> >cost money.

That's how prohosting.com works, it seems to me, except that
the 'basic' part includes a lot, such as CGI scripting; the 'extras'
that they hope you will eventually purchase are domain-name
hosting or parking, site design, and other professional stuff.

I would describe this business model as generating goodwill
and notoriety and hoping to cash in on those.


> time is ticking over. Apparently freeserve, btconnect et al aren't quite
> so nasty, but all are getting kickbacks on the telephone time.

This is the basic business model here in Italy, too, and the
reason so many free providers are springing up, because the
cashflow is rapid.  IS Providers here are technically 'phone
companies', which 'happen' to receive much more incoming
traffic from Telecom Italia (or other 'real' phone companies)
than they generate towards them (unsurprisingly, because
they don't actually offer phone subscriptions...:-); periodically,
Telecom Italia must therefore pay them a fraction of the money
it earns from traffic going to them.  It works out to about 3 or 4
cents of a Euro, or equivalently of a US$, per minute of connect
time, going into the ISP's coffers; not a fortune, but a useful
adjunct to other (slower/less reliable) income sources.  Some
also offer ISDN service, I think they make a bit more out of it.

It's basically the same idea as international "free" phone-sex
lines (except that in those cases the amount per minute is far
higher, since international calls are costlier).

>From the user's POV, if he's using POTS and a modem (or,
ISDN) to connect to an ISP, he's paying the phone bill anyway;
so, the free supplier _is_ actually free, in that all he's paying
is the phone bill, nothing extra.  I think this only works for
countries where a phone call has a cost proportional to its
length, of course, but that is indeed the case in Italy.


Alex