Internet squeezes.

New business’s always relied on the consumer taking the leap of trying something less traditional, changing their ingrained habits. To do this we all had to be tempted with something to make it worth our while.

I remember in the early 1990’s when Sky satellite TV started, hundreds of channels and everything free. As soon as enough people signed up it became subscription for sport, the movies, it’s just the same with Netflix, Amazon, Spotify.

Remember the good old days when you could get flights for a penny or 99p? I said at the time that this would be the beginning of the end for the high street travel agents. The one thing that makes customers change their habits is a ‘too good to be true’ bargain. The public were incentivised to switch by offers they simply could not refuse and the high street travel agents dwindled away.

These offers were massive loss-leaders but headline grabbing manoeuvres and in the early days cost the companies millions. To send a fully loaded plane to Spain and back costs tens of thousands of pounds every journey in wages, aviation fuel, taxes, schedule and such like and in the worst scenario one plane load of passengers did not even generate £500 in ticket sales! However, the ones like Ryanair, Easyjet & Jet2 that were able to ride the storm are benefitting greatly now because they have the monopoly on flights having obliterated the competition and it now means consumers have less choice so these are now the ‘go to’ websites which means they no longer need to offer loss-leaders.

Remember when YouTube let you watch any video you liked at a simple search, just like that? Notice now because it gradually went to an advert appearing before your requested video started….with the option of skipping after 5 seconds. Notice again more recently, sometimes the skip option is not there and you have to watch the advert….even more recently I’ve had two adverts forced on me. It will only be a matter of time before YouTube becomes a subscription channel. It’s all free to begin with, that’s the incentive to use it, the content is amazing and you can even upload your own stuff. At that point we are personally invested in the platform; it becomes a necessity for us. Once we are at this stage it is only a matter of time it becomes monetarized even further.

Today the social media platforms have similar plans in the pipelines now they feel they are ingrained enough in society that we can’t manage without them. We think they are free but have had to give up so much personal information just to use them; they know our ip addresses, our home addresses, emails, mobile numbers, mother’s maiden name, city born and so much more makes this incredibly valuable to many companies who pay a premium to buy it off them for their own purposes.

These priceless things will soon start to cost more!