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William of Orange, or William III, was King
of England between 1672 and 1702. He didn’t really do anything remarkable,
except think of ways to make money because he was a bit skint after knocking
seven bells out of the French. His most famous way of making money was the ‘Window
Tax’, the bigger and more windows you had the more you got taxed. The idea was
to tax the use of freely available things like air, water and in this case
sunlight.
As far as getting something for free go
sunlight is right up there with wind and rain. People got a bit fed up of
paying for actual windows, so they just left holes in the wall or had a brick
lattice instead. Now back in 1690 when the tax was introduced central heating didn’t
as such exist and the winters were probably colder etc etc, so people jus got
cold and wet instead of paying.
SO what on earth would possess my compadre
Ben to think that by making people pay for facebook that they would still use
it?
The poor boy will quote some textbook
economic jibberjabber about supply and demand dropping, the companies not
making any money blah blah blah.
If facebook sold out and started making us
pay we’d all just stop using it, some clever little opensource fiend would rip
off the format, cut the crap out and send it back out into the world just so
he/she can be the person who rebuilt facebook.
The facebook advertising may not work on Ben,
but I suspect there are quite a few people out there possibly with lower IQ’s(difficult
but possible) then Ben do click on them. Facebook have already realised the
huge potential of the site with regards to browsing patterns of users and not
forgetting of course that ‘groups’ or ‘fans’ are just giant poll gauging
customer/user opinion.
Twitter got clever and are going to charge
individuals twittering on behalf of a company or organisation. It’s a fairly
good system, its cheaper then conventional advertising and more accessible
making companies want to use it. Only a couple of months the government
advertised for someone to become a Director of Digital Engagement, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1152412/160-000-job-help-ministers-tap-Twittering-classes.html
, which is basically aimed at how they can use twitter. Clearly the government are
willing to pay for twitter, and they are stingy (except when it comes to
expenses).
Other companies already twitter about their
business as an advertising tool. One springs to mind http://www.situpandkick.com/, I heard
about this company recently off a twitter feed. Well would you look at that its
BEN’S DAD’S company!
Incidentally this would mean that BEN
himself would be charged because of his recent twittering promoting his dad’s
photos taken at badmington horse trials. How do you feel about that ‘Jamin? Would
you have made sufficient profit to cover the advertising?
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