[OT] movie trailer - .Net vs Java

[Benjamin Scott]

On Mon, Jun 28, 2010 at 11:11 AM, Bill Sconce <sconce at in-spec-inc.com> wrote:
> First time I've tried a YouTube video and gotten "please register".
> Ouch. Didn't know they'd done that.

  Hmmm, I didn't have any trouble watching it, although my Gmail
sign-on usually carries over to YouTube, so I may not have noticed.

  But I just tried clicking the link again now, and I get "This video
is private", even though it says I'm signed-in to YouTube in the upper
right corner of the page.

  I think whatever's going on here isn't due to some ploy by Google to
increase their rate of data mining.  (Which is not to say they don't
mine a lot of data already; they do.  I just think this is unrelated
to their plot to take over the world.)

>  "...But, according to Hitwise's numbers, simply adding the registration
>  barrier has cut traffic to the site almost in half."

  Less people availing themselves of something that costs money, vs
when it was free?  Whodathunkit?

  What matters is not the total traffic, but return-on-investment.  If
they can make more money charging a smaller number of people for the
same content, that might make sense.

  I don't have a problem paying for content, so long as it's with
people's prior consent.  If  I don't judge it worth my money, I can
vote with my wallet and do without.  While I believe the idea of a
news*paper* is fast approaching horse-and-buggy status, I'm as yet
unsure how the whole news industry is going to shake out.  If it was
of sufficiently high quality, I could perhaps see people being willing
to pay for news.  But first we'd have to have a high quality news
source, which I also suspect might qualify for horse-and-buggy status.
 No, wait, the horse-and-buggy was an actual, viable technology at one
time.  Perpetual-motion-machine status, then.

-- Ben