A link visited: Why are we charged for Wi-Fi?

A while ago I was wondering why you need to pay for a Wi-Fi access at the Amsterdam’s airport. Seth Godin explains the idea behind it in Nickel and Diming:

“Wifi is a great example. The marginal cost of hosting one more person on a wifi network is as close to zero as something can be. Charge people more than $10 a day and suddenly you’re making hundreds or thousands of dollars of extra profit.”

(…)

“I have no doubt that this works in the short run. It might even work out to be a viable marketing strategy in some markets. However, the alternative is worth considering. Not only do everything you say you’re going to do, but do more.

Offering low marginal cost items for free is a shortcut to generating word of mouth, which is a lot cheaper than buying ads.”

A link visited: Jason Calacanis as a great marketer

I’m going to link to Jason Calacanis’ talk on Le Web 3 not because I’d agree with everything he says or does, but because I think it shows how great job he is doing in promoting his product.

He could say “we have this human-powered search engine, go check it, thanks.” Done, finito. Or he can talk about the tremendous amount of spam on the web there is nowadays and how polluted results you get sometimes if you try to find some useful information. And he can be absolutely right and he would make people go “OK, so what is it YOU do to improve this mess?” And he would go “Let me show you.” And that’s what he does. Smart.

[A link visited] Seth Godin about his new book

Seth Godin wrote a new book (yes, again) which will be released on December 27. Eric Enge interviewed Seth about the ideas in the book. Now this interview is a bit longer to read (I’d prefer having a podcast for such a length), but it’s definitely worth the time.

“It becomes easier to grow. One interesting thing is that with no exceptions, of every consumer brand that has grown from nothing in the last ten years, not one of them has been built on the back of television. In 1978 or 1968 it was a 100%, and now it’s 0%.”

“This is not a little sideshow, I believe that this is the beginning of the future, because there is no reason that I can think of why our children and certainly our grandchildren will sit down and tune into CBS and watch something.”

“They also have the power to have their own channel. They have the power to broadcast, not just receive. And, what that means as a marketer is if you get caught, or if someone doesn’t like you they are going to tell everybody. That’s not word of mouth, that’s something else.”

“It turns out that that’s ridiculous, because paying money to reach somebody who just bought a new car when you are selling cars is silly. Paying money to reach somebody who is doing their best to ignore you is silly.”

I’m telling ya, go check it out..