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Friday, June 11, 2004
Would you like fries with that?
Just to clarify something I mentioned in my previous post...when I said "premium", I did not mean to imply that one day we will suddenly shut everything down and say "cough up".
When I talk about "premium", I talk about adding further optional services onto what currently exists. What those services are, I cannot say -- I can only say that they've been discussed on various occasions.
But if we do launch a premium service (and at some point we probably will), it will not affect anyone who currently has myO/OB accounts. And it won't affect anyone who joins in the future -- it will still be free to use all of our sites, including OB, myOtaku and all of the portfolio sites. So, nothing will change for anyone. I want to be very clear about that.
On that note -- just as a matter of principle -- I don't believe that it is unfair or unreasonable to transform our "brand" into something that actually makes money. I'm sure that if Adam and I could actually produce a business from what we do online, we would jump at the chance. Afterall, who wouldn't want to have a career doing what they love?
But this does not -- and never will -- mean that we would alienate anyone. Everything we do is carefully planned. So we would never do an IGN-esque thing where we say "Oh, sorry, now you can't visit this page that you've always used, because it costs money". That's just not our style and it never has been.
It would more be a case of saying "if you want to access all of these new, premium-specific features, you'd have to sign-up to a paid account". And even then, I think you'd find that anything "premium" we do would be a lot more accessible than what many other sites are doing. Again, it's just the way we do things.
Of course, having said all of the above...I do not want to presume anything or give you the wrong impression. I understand that a lot of entertainment sites (particularly web hosts) have slowly crept in with fees...and they've forced people onto lesser and lesser services until finally, you have to pay just to register.
So I know that this fear is not unfounded, based on your experiences elsewhere.
Of course, here is not elsewhere. ~_^
At the end of the day though, I hope that those of you who hate the idea of paying for something online understand that this network is a highly expensive endeavour. The fact that we're essentially offering you a product for free (myOtaku) is pretty darn good, considering that it cost time and money to engineer from the ground up. So please be aware of that.
But again -- and just to make sure -- I am in no way suggesting that our services will one day cease to be free. Everything you can use now -- in addition to some new services that come along -- will always be free. There's no question about that.
But at some point we may decide to offer some new, high-tech service that won't be free. Whether you decide to make use of that will be entirely up to you at the time. ^_^
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