Glenn Fleishman shared a piece he freelanced to The New York Times whose point is, simply, that even free WiFi needs a business model.
The story is about how some coffee houses are turning off the WiFi because they don't like the fact that their shops become offices. People shut up around WiFi. They bring in their PCs, turn on, and tune out the world around them. They may buy a coffee (increasingly they don't) but that's all you're going to get out of them.
Coffee shops and restaurants have beren the leaders in the WiFi "hotspot" movement based on the assumption they will be good for business, that people who WiFi also eat and drink.
Turns out we don't. Not that much, anyway. And we don't leave the table, either.
All of which leaves these shops without a valid business model. Would those using free WiFi object too much if they grabbed a piece of your browser's real estate and forced ads on you while you worked? How about if they put in a WiFi tip jar? I'm open to suggestions here.
It surprises me that this may be what kills the free WiFi movement dead. I would have expected it would be the risk from hackers or spammers using the resource. Or the RIAA cracking down because free WiFi'ers were using p2p systems. Or porn. (The picture is Coffee Shop, by Aligi Sassu, from the Liffeyside blog in Dublin, Ireland.)
I gurantee these issues will stifle the rise of alternative, government-funded WiFi, whether on the streets or in libraries. Shiite, Sunni and Christian politicians will all demand filters, as will the copyright industries. This is regardless of the success that phone incumbents may have in simply outlawing municipal WiFi.
Meanwhile, of course, Europe is experimenting with this and Asia is moving full speed ahead.
Guess whose kids are going to be sitting in the CEO chairs 20 years from now?
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. RichW on June 13, 2005 02:13 PM writes...
In addition to my marketing biz, I'm also co-owner of a coffee shop. We offer a paid model (Telerama) simply because we don't have the skill set to deal with maintenance (let alone security) of a free wifi model.
We do have one guy who spends about $8.00/day and on average is at a table for six hours. As we rarely fill up every single table it's not an issue, but the $8 we get from him is probably $4 more than we get from any other wifi users.
We've even begun accepting FedEx packages for this guy as his "office". He's an interesting and funny guy and sort of a store mascot now, so we're not going to ask him to leave. So we're getting imaginative. We've discussed a monthly bill for him so that he can claim his table as office space on his taxes.
Permalink to Comment2. Jesse Kopelman on June 13, 2005 02:39 PM writes...
In the end, I think this is not really about WiFi. It is about letting people hang out in your shop all day without buying. It's not like it costs any more to provide WiFi than, say, air conditioning. Both of those things encourage people to come to your place rather than a place that doesn't have them. If people are coming in and not spending the money and most importantly taking up table space you could put to better use, you need to have a policy of kicking them out. There are plenty of places that ask you to leave if you stay too long without buying anything -- whether they have WiFi or not.
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