Internet runs on idiots

Having been using internet regularly for last nine years, question that has puzzled me often is that how do internet companies make money. Internet has brought such fundamental changes in public mindset that users consider demanding something free as their birthright rather than a thankful opportunity. Almost every software and application on internet has free, and in most cases, better substitute. Having email, photo sharing, blogging, voice or video chatting, social networking, document editing, classifieds and various other things for free has spoiled a typical internet user so much that even newspapers who have been charging in print for eons are protested against when they charge online.

Of course I know that most internet companies make money by advertising. Few charge money for using premium services but significantly most don’t. Whole lot of Google services are funded by contextual advertising links though there are many places such as Blogger and Picasa where it doesn’t advertise yet. Nevertheless, in my decade of usages I never remembered clicking any advert on any webpage or clicking any link on any spam mail.  Still, there must be people who are clicking those advertising links and banners. There must be people who are clicking and ordering services from spam mail. Sending bulk email on internet is so cheap that with even one hundredths of a percent of people falling for spammer, it would make marketing efforts worth the cost. And there must be those fractions of humanity who are making spam grow at such as fast rate. Here is a latest example (via). Yes, in this day and age. By the way, here is a mindboggling statistics: Number of spam messages sent everyday are around 176000000000 (176 billion or 1.76 kharab)

We all should be thankful to those idiots who click on spam mail and contextual advertising links on web pages. They are morons who keep things free for rest of us. Their contribution cannot be discounted. Perhaps that’s why we should forgive their temporal intrusion into internet arena because but for those where would you and I, the freeloaders, be?