A consideration often overlooked in these 'pay money lest ye be the product' quips is that quite often, a company might be pretty hard-pushed to make their busi

A consideration often overlooked in these 'pay money lest ye be the product' quips is that quite often, a company might be pretty hard-pushed to make their business model work that way. If you're offering a free service to (many) users, and getting money from (relatively fewer) advertising agents/networks, you have two things going for you: 1) the people actually giving you money are professionals, who will probably pay, and more importantly, will probably pay quite a lot over a single deal/contract. 2) not having to scale your customer support to (tens of) millions of users saves you a hell of a lot of money, especially if the people doing the paying aren't the unwashed public who in general need their hands held to find caps-lock. If you switch from 1000s of customers each paying you $millions, to 10s of millions of customers paying you $10, your support costs go through the roof: you've got to deal with customer support/retention on a much larger scale, your billing system needs to be up to the task, payment fraud will skyrocket, etc. I'm not sure how even someone like Facebook could weather the transition from advertiser-pays to user-pays without a lot of pain and stock value implosion.