One of the beauties of Web publishing is that it can be free or nearly free. It can be done in such a way that it need not make money. And indeed if your site is destined to lose money it is much less humiliating when you can say that making money wasn't the idea. Nonetheless there are plenty of folks who've forgotten that greed is one of the seven deadly sins. This chapter, therefore, is about how to make money on the Internet.
First, let's ask anyone thinks that there is money to be made off the Internet. Karl Taylor Compton, former president of MIT, said it best in 1938: "In recent times, modern science has developed to give mankind, for the first time in the history of the human race, a way of securing a more abundant life which does not simply consist in taking away from someone else."
I believe that computers will secure a more abundant life for the human race. This would not have been a controversial statement in 1960, when IBM was just beginning to saturate corporate America with mainframes It was obvious to everyone in 1960 that computers were going to usher in a new Age of Leisure. In 2003, this statement seems absurd. Computers have been around for more than fifty years without having done much for the average person. In fact, it is a commonplace among economists that computers have reduced the productivity of American business.
Computers by themselves are a liability. Getting information into and out of them is so expensive that using paper and file cabinets is probably less trouble. Sure, in 2003 we don't see too many people manually writing payroll checks or calculating artillery shell trajectories. But most people get through most parts of their day without relying on a computer. Why is this unlikely to be true in another 50 years? Because of the network.
