16th Sep 2002
Enenations Discovers No Biz Model in Free, After All
Back in June, I wrote about the introduction of a new comments service for webloggers called enetation, which I put on my own ExecutiveSummary.com site. Shortly afterwards, a reader wrote in with skepticism, wondering how in the post-1999 world a service like this expected to stay in business giving away all the great functionality for free. At that time, the guy who is behind the service, Rob Taylor (I had to use the Internic WhoIs to get his last name, as I couldn’t find it at all on the site or in our email correspondence), responded to me, promising they were not evil spammers but just well-meaning coders (as I had expected), noting:
There will be a point where I will have to make enetation ‘pay for itself’, or at least not incur infinately expanding costs to run it, that is as your reader correctly points out its very 1999ish and hiding from reality if I just ignore the issue until its too late. Usually generating an income stream would be done via donations or some form of ‘Pro’ version for a subscription fee. However I hope to combat that by enabling users to ‘donate’ bandwidth and ‘load balancing’ the commenting system. I must state this is just an idea and an ideal at this moment, and it would be damn good if the community could ‘run’ its own commenting systems!
Meanwhile, I quit using the service on ExecutiveSummary.com after determining it was massively slowing down my site. I liked the feature, and a few readers have asked me to bring comments back, but I won’t until I’m sure that it won’t slow down the site like that again. (I’m planning to switch from Blogger to Moveable Type anyway, which I think has a comments tool.)
Anyway, the point of all this (yes, I have those, occasionally) is that reality has now caught up with enetations and it’s too expensive to run for free anymore, so Rob sent out an appeal for donations to users this morning. I wish them luck. My advice: instead of “donations,” just charge for the darned thing.
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