Stardate 20010910.1942 (On Screen): With the collapse of online advertising, Geocities' business model ceased to make sense. Still, the original owners got out before the collapse and stuck Yahoo with the corpse. Now Yahoo is trying to salvage something from the wreckage by trying to force its customers to switch over to a paid model. (All good things come to an end.) There's a quote in this article from an industry analyst which I find to be curious. "If there's a free competitor that's widely known by consumers, then paid services will fail," says Jordan Rohan, a media analyst at investment banking firm SoundView Technology Group. Um,
no. He's still thinking "new economy" here. Eyeballs don't matter; they're just a bandwidth expense. Free customers don't pay anything. One paying customer is worth a hundred free ones. If Geocities chases away 99 free customers and convinces one to start paying, Yahoo is money ahead, because expenses are down and income is up.
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