The ads are only one of the things that, as a list owner, I would
not accept from a free service. Here is another (from eGroups'
terms of service, section 9):
You agree that upon posting any material within a group open to the public on the
Service, you grant eGroups, and its successors and assigns, a non-exclusive,
worldwide, royalty free, perpetual, non-revocable license under your copyrights or
other intellectual property rights, if any, in such material, to use, distribute, display,
reproduce, and create derivative works from such material in any and all media, in
any manner, in whole or part, without any duty to account to you.
Problem 1 is that I don't think this is a fair price to pay for a free
service. Problem 2 is, well consider the following scenario. I start
this mailing list and eGroups obtains the rights outlined above. Joe
subscribes to my list, totally unaware of this, and posts a valuable
message, which eGroups reprints in a book for instance. Joe gets
angry and lawyers get involved. I find myself in the middle of the
firefight because I did not clearly indicate in the welcome message
that eGroups had this right. Actually, I'm not even sure this would
hold water in court. Anyway, eGroups claims the right to create
derivative work with no duty or account to the copyright holder.
This means that if I post a piece of code with a clear copyright
statement (and the code is mine), they have the right to use it as
they please, modify it, include it as an example on a CD in a
book, and get paid for it. I'm not a lawyer but I suspect they can
even turn it into a commercial product, sell it and you don't get
a cent. Contrast with what is required for a private group:
[U]pon posting any material within a private, members-only group on the Service,
you grant eGroups, and its successors and assigns, a non-exclusive worldwide,
royalty free, perpetual, non-revocable license under your copyrights or other
intellectual property rights, if any, in such material to distribute, display, and
reproduce such material to other members of that group.
That is perfectly reasonable and only gives them the right to do
their job and deliver the message to other members of the group.
It does not include the all-important word "use" and is limited to
relevant media. There is no legal reason for them to need more
than that (with "other members of that group" changed to "anyone")
for public lists.
Topica says essentially the same, in a more concise form (section 7):
You agree that as to any material you transmit through Topica's
Service, you grant to Topica, and its successors, a non-exclusive,
worldwide, royalty free, perpetual license to use such material to
provide current and future services.
This may sound much more limited, but remember that a "future
service" could be absolutely anything, especially for companies
that have very low revenues and are prime targets for acquisitions.
I just took a look at reference.com, the first (earliest) large-scale
archiving site, and it has this big notice saying "Reference.com will be
unavailable until further notice. Thank you for supporting
Reference.com." It appears to have been bought by one sift.com,
a direct e-mail marketing company. One of their services is:
Prospector - Prospector produces "table-ready" leads not otherwise available by
monitoring the conversation in public discussion forums on the Internet. (You
can learn more about Internet discussion forums by accessing Sift's
Reference.COM Site. Reference.COM provides the Internet's most comprehensive
resource for accessing Internet forums). In these forums, prospective buyers
seek advice from others about what products/services to purchase. Prospector
extracts and builds a profile of these prospects, to produce 'enhanced' intender leads.
When reference.com was introduced, the party line was that they
would provide a useful and FREE service to the Internet community,
in the spirit of the Internet, etc. To quote from the help page:
Through Reference.COM, users can easily find, browse, search, and participate
in more than 120,000 Internet forums. Because this service is advertiser-supported,
it is free of charge to you.
The original management may have had the best of intentions, but
today the search function has been disabled, and the archives are
being used to sell information about mailing list members so that they
can better be contacted by salesmen. In retrospect, I am glad I blocked
reference.com's access to the servers I manage (although the reason
was that they did not seek permission to archive as they assumed that
the service they provide is so useful that everyone would want it).
The point I am trying to drive here is that companies that provide FREE
services still need to pay the bills somehow. Today it is extremely difficult
to turn a profit from banner advertising unless you are able to reach a
critical mass which is actually very large, and probably beyond the
reasonable reach of a free archiver. As for the free mailing list sites, their
fundamental problem is that most people want to read their mail in their
mailbox, not on a web site (which they may however use to manage their
subscription, but how often do you do that?), and that advertisers are
not interested in paying for plain-text inserts. At L-Soft we have clients who
are able to sell plain-text inserts, but to be effective this requires a
significant effort on the part of the company buying the space, and it
only works with certain types of mailing lists. On the other hand, it is
comparatively easy to sell a "portal" to a deeper-pocketed buyer once
you have managed to create one (remember, Netscape wasn't bought for its
software, but for its portal). Likewise for a large collection of postings
on which you have obtained unrestricted rights of use. The free mailing
list sites would not be paying people $300 (yep, three hundred) to migrate
a 250-user list if they were not confident in their ability to recover a lot
more than $300 from the list, and that kind of money is clearly not coming
from banner ads (otherwise they would not offer to turn off banners for
just $50/year). They are in essence offering you 6 years of banner free
service, that should give you a fairly good idea of exactly how important
banners are to their business plan. Interestingly, you can finance a
commercial service by migrating your list, taking the $300 cash incentive,
posting the minimum of one weekly posting, and using the money to pay
a commercial provider. The $300 may not last forever but you can obtain
it several times (several providers offer this bonus, actually one of them
now pays $500). You can probably make a living being a list owner just by
switching your lists over, each list can make you $1100 between the
three main providers and, if you do this full-time, you can manage
dozens of list. Here you have a Make Money Fast scheme that is
perfectly legal and might actually work.
Anyway, I would be very surprised to hear that banner advertisements
pay more than 10% of the costs, if that. The free service is paid for by
the people who are going to acquire the company once it is big and attractive
enough to be sold. As reference.com illustrates, they may have a very
different purpose from the original company's.
Eric
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