Any reasonable amount of traffic is so cheap as to be basically free. The problem is that the network effect can potentially bring you unreasonable amounts of traffic. In our current set up we pay $25/month for 10 gigabytes of data transfer. After that we pay 10 cents a megabyte. If we assume pages are around 50k each (although the front page is much less, and pages with lots of pictures are more) then that means 20 page views = 1 meg of traffic, so 20,000 page views = 1 gigabyte of traffic, and 200,000 page views would equal our 10 gig limit. We would not be shut down at this point though, we would just start being charged. In fact there would be no real way to turn it off. I guess the problem is that if you get 200,000 page views a month then there's really no reason why you couldn't (or wouldn't) get a million, and something in that range would be expensive. (800,000 extra hits above the 200,000 limit x 50k = 40,000 megs of extra traffic which would be at 10 cents a megabyte x 40,000 = $4000 extra charge.) So yes, it can get expensive. But that's a ridiculous amount of traffic. We transfer in the neighborhood of 500 megs a month (1/2 a gigabyte out of our allowed 10.) Basically all it takes is for slashdot to have a story about you on their front page and your servers will go down with tens of thousands of simulataneous hits.
My philosophy is that there is no point in just blindly trying to accumulate hits. The economics have already proven there is no way to turn all those hits into anything but a revenue drain (because of the bandwidth.) And the problem only gets worse as the media gets more rich. That doorknob page was several hundred kilobytes (instead of 50) and something like a grainy little postage stamp sized movie video could be several megabytes. That stuff can really add up. I love the idea that the web is free for surfers, and I love the openness of these forums. But I don't consider it a goal just to get a lot of people to look. I guess the goal is more to get the right kind of people to look.
Thanks for walking me through the math--I've not seen it so clearly explained before. Slashdot, hell--think about what must have happened when Thomas Friedman of the New York Times did an enthusiastic column a couple of years back on that cottage e-business in the Midwest (or wherever it was). He basically signed their death warrant! (They went belly up a few months after the column, but Friedman never admitted his own role--in their initial success or later failure.) Actually, Friedman's been strangely silent these days after all his foolish e-commerce predictions. If he'd had you to explain the numbers, he not have crowed so loudly about the "internet economy."
But that Fluxus guy shouldn't have been shut down--most folks don't give a crap about avant garde art! Don't you think Earthlink is setting the bar a bit low?
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My philosophy is that there is no point in just blindly trying to accumulate hits. The economics have already proven there is no way to turn all those hits into anything but a revenue drain (because of the bandwidth.) And the problem only gets worse as the media gets more rich. That doorknob page was several hundred kilobytes (instead of 50) and something like a grainy little postage stamp sized movie video could be several megabytes. That stuff can really add up. I love the idea that the web is free for surfers, and I love the openness of these forums. But I don't consider it a goal just to get a lot of people to look. I guess the goal is more to get the right kind of people to look.
- jim 4-09-2001 5:47 pm
Thanks for walking me through the math--I've not seen it so clearly explained before. Slashdot, hell--think about what must have happened when Thomas Friedman of the New York Times did an enthusiastic column a couple of years back on that cottage e-business in the Midwest (or wherever it was). He basically signed their death warrant! (They went belly up a few months after the column, but Friedman never admitted his own role--in their initial success or later failure.) Actually, Friedman's been strangely silent these days after all his foolish e-commerce predictions. If he'd had you to explain the numbers, he not have crowed so loudly about the "internet economy."
But that Fluxus guy shouldn't have been shut down--most folks don't give a crap about avant garde art! Don't you think Earthlink is setting the bar a bit low?
- Tom Moody 4-09-2001 8:30 pm [2 comments]