As it turns out, he’s not alone. A new generation of web entrepreneurs has discovered the joys of charging users cold, hard cash. Along with Pinboard, there’s the read-it-later service Instapaper, private social-network site Ning, and innumerable iPhone apps that require you to lay down coin.
If we’re lucky, this trend will save the Internet from one of the most corrosive forces affecting it—the bloodless logic of advertising.
For years, of course, everyone has claimed that you can’t charge for anything online. If you dream up a cool new tool, your only way to make money is to generate as many impressions as possible for advertisers. This inevitably produces horrid, cynical designs that work against what people want. Consider Facebook: Each year, it redesigns its site to gradually nudge users to make more and more of their material public. This is partly because CEO Mark Zuckerberg seems to think publicness is inherently good—but it’s also a rational response to the demands of the ad market, which needs as many people looking at as many things as possible.
In contrast, charging for your service neatly aligns your desires with those of your customers (as a bonus, you can call them customers instead of users). “There’s a magical relationship you have with people who are paying you money,” says David Heinemeier Hansson, a partner at 37signals, which runs several paid web services like Basecamp. “You worry about doing what they need and request.”
