The Cost of Free

IDC analyst Steve Harris was so annoyed by his free ISP that he turned his pain into a report, "The Free ISP Experience," documenting his personal experiences using six free ISPs.

by Alex Goldman
Associate Editor, ISP-Planet
[August 10, 2000]

In "The Free ISP Experience," IDC's Steve Harris tested six free ISPs: BlueLight.com (a Spinway service), Excite FreeLane (the service uses 1stup.com, and was originally called FreeWorld), Freeinternet.com, Juno, NetZero, and WorldSpy.net.

The ISP he liked most, WorldSpy.net, was not ad-supported and went bankrupt as the report was being written.

Blood or money
Harris explained that there's a tradeoff. The services are difficult to use, and especially difficult to get started with. Downloading large files over a 56K connection can be a disheartening experience for anyone accustomed to the speeds provided by business-quality Internet connections.

Then there's installation, which can be time-consuming and confusing. "One of the services asked me for my 'Program Manager Group' and I did not know what that was so I used the default."

Harris said that he experienced regular drops, "illegal operations," and disconnects only from NetZero, but all six ISPs had problems when server authentication failed, and the software on his computer stalled, waiting for a reply that never came.

"The real cost is in personal time and frustration," Harris concluded. He added that if you use the Internet briefly or rarely, free is probably right for you, but that anyone who spends time on the Internet should pay in currency, not blood pressure.

Ads
He liked WorldSpy.net most because it did not have ads. When asked about Full-Motion Video (FMV) ads on Spinway and 1stUp, he noted that since 1stUp supplies those ads through flash, and he did not download the flash plugin, he never saw the 1stUp ad technology.

"But I did see Wynonna Judd singing the K-Mart theme on BlueLight.com. That had a real 'wow' factor, a first time coolness. It was high quality video and audio, and I did not mind it at all."

Of ad-window ISPs, he preferred those that do not use a floating window. Instead, they just place a banner at the top of the page. The window would get in the way, no matter how small it was.

While on BlueLight.com, Harris found himself using Yahoo! a lot because it has an agreement with BlueLight.com by which the only ad the appears while the user is there is a K-Mart logo. So if you use Yahoo! while on BlueLight, you will avoid most of the ads.

CRM is for weenies
Many of these providers do not provide live customer support. "You have to e-mail them," said Harris, "which can be tough if your problem is that you cannot get online. 1stUp does provide live customer service, but their software was easy to use, so I never used their customer service."

At the time of the report, NetZero was charging $15 per month for live customer service.

Forms
All of these services require a significant amount of personal information, which means filling out lots of forms.

The only privacy issue he noticed was a blatant one on Juno. "They could change it easily, and I hope they will because it's a good service, but they had a privacy statement and terms of use, and then the first e-mail that I received online was an introduction to the service that said, at the end, 'by the way, we've changed our terms of use, and only these apply.' I also noticed that, for example, the forms initially said that a phone number was not required, but then when I did not supply one, the software told me that a phone number was required."

Conclusion
So there are people who probably should be using free ISPs — those who only use the Internet occasionally — but they won't be generating many page views for the free ISPs.

Looking to the future, Harris noted that there are several business models. There are pure advertising models like NetZero, and there are the affiliate marketing deals like BlueLight.com.

Other models include Juno's "value-chain" model, where customers move up to paid subscriptions, providing free access to employees of large companies, and WorldSpy's e-commerce-supported business model.

In a report due out in late August, Harris hopes to collect data on revenue and expenses that will enable readers to judge the viability of the free ISP models.

—End