5 ms·
At sufficient scale anything free ceases to be so and anything cheap starts to get expensive. This certainly applies to bandwidth. I assume either the free tier
by cletus 5y ago
At sufficient scale anything free ceases to be so and anything cheap starts to get expensive. This certainly applies to bandwidth. I assume either the free tier was starting to get significantly expensive or it was simply so large that the potential ad revenue was too large a carrot to ignore. I can't say which.
But I feel like Zoom is missing an opportunity here. I just went through the exercise of googling "zoom pricing" and... I'm confused. I still don't know how much it costs.
Twitch can largely be credited with the model of supporting creators with monthly subscriptions. Obviously they didn't invent the monthly subscription but they made it "mainstream" (within the context of Twitch viewers) such that many creators can support themselves this way with audience sizes that aren't large enough to be supported by ad revenue.
The point is that Twitch created a user behaviour of supporting creators with sufficient scale to matter.
So with Zoom, the pricing should be transparent and obvious. Obviously you're going to have the company plans that cover all participants. It probably shouldn't be "unlimited" as those are your most valuable customers and the most willing to pay.
But the missed opportunity here is to incentivize individuals to pay with features that might matter to them. I'm not sure what those are but in the very least, paid users should receive no ads. Make this $5/month. Lots of people will pay that if you toss in a few premium features.
Ad-supporting free services is so pervasive because it's effective but it's also lazy. With the rise of remote work, there are a lot of people who will gladly pay some small monthly fee to make their life easier even if their employer won't. Build user behaviour.
- the_other 5y agoKnee jerk reaction here because I’m a layperson in this area… > anything cheap starts to get expensive. This certainly applies to bandwidth. This breaks the basic supply-demand rule. It’s also happening more often. Why are our business models so messed uo?
- MattGaiser 5y agoEach unit of bandwidth is probably getting cheaper, but if you end up giving away a ton of it, it is still a massive expense.
- floatingatoll 5y agoModern advertising enable predatory pricing without significant (or any) financial cost to the predator. There are fewer (or no) protections against predatory pricing in most markets because classical economics assumed that businesses would fail if they deprived themselves of revenue. That is no longer the case.
- nemothekid 5y agoWhen it comes to bandwidth, supply is largely fixed and the suppliers (ISPs, AWS) are corrupt or would rather just collect rents. It's incredibly difficult for a new company to make inroads as well (even for a company like Google, which seems to have paused its Google Fiber rollout)
- Nextgrid 5y agoThey could always work on making the system peer-to-peer. You will never get 100% of the way there because of some overly restrictive networks, but you can get the majority of users (especially those on home connections without enterprise firewalls/etc) to connect directly making it sustainable enough (the last 10% can just be subsidized by paying users and/or by ads - it could literally be a "fix your network for P2P to work, or watch ads to pay for TURN relays).
- wanderingshi 5y agodo we not remember the disaster that was p2p skype
- jhugo 5y agoP2P multiparty videoconferencing just isn't realistic outside of tech demos. In a call of 20 participants, someone with a typical 720p webcam would be transmitting more than 50Mbit/s, which doesn't sound like a lot when ISPs market so-called "1Gbit fibre", but in fact is more than a lot of residential connections and home Wi-Fi can reliably push without unacceptable loss/delay/jitter. A product built with this architecture could not deliver the reliability and performance that Zoom delivers with the variety of connectivity quality that its users have.
- ninkendo 5y agoI wonder if WebRTC will ever support Multicast IP (or maybe explicit multi-unicast) so that you only need to upload one copy of your signal. Something tells me the various consumer routers out there wouldn't know how to deal with the traffic...
- toast0 5y agoWebRTC can support it all they want, but to a first approximation, Multicast doesn't work over the open internet, so it won't help outside of corporate videoconference (which generally runs OK, because corporate networks are mostly wired and often overprovisioned or easier to provision than homes)
- comeonseriously 5y ago> ... or it was simply so large that the potential ad revenue was too large a carrot to ignore. I'm always inclined to think this is the case. Investors are always wanting to know how you're going to increase returns THIS quarter.
- leodriesch 5y agoNot sure if you would get many personal users to pay when there is Meet, Teams, Discord and FaceTime. IIRC they all don’t have ads.