Not everything on the Internet is or needs to be free.

Like much of the internet, I am still in mourning over the upcoming, planned demise (or as Google would like to call it "sunset") of Google Reader. I have tremendous respect for the product not just for what it does but how it does it. In the era of fancy page turn driven Flipboard, Pulse and Google's own Currents, Reader is still the best and most utilitarian way of consuming content. Without frills and fancies, it just boils down to what matters most. The content. The whole affair got me to thinking, what if there was a Reader offered by Google for a fee?. Would that have prevented this from happening?.Everything must be free.From the day of the browser, we are used to free things on the Internet. Unlike the real world where everything has a cost, we are accustomed to getting everything for free on the Internet. We want free email but scream when Google uses our email to target small obscure text ads in the Gmail UI. We share away everything and more on Facebook but are indignant every time they update their privacy policy to make every user count towards their bottom-line via third-party ads. We love the Spotify library but hate that they actually charge to stream to your mobile device. How dare they?.Behind every product and every service on the Internet, there are a bunch of engineers and  not to mention infrastructure that includes servers, data centers, and what not.  And if they were to offer everything for free, who is to pay for all of that?The Ad driven services modelGoogle was the first to really pioneer the ad-driven services model. They pretty much gave everything for free bar the occasional premium version of some software with additional storage (Picasa, Google Music) or enhanced business driven features (Google Apps). In return the user agreed to let their content and browsing habits be mined for targeted ads from Google. It was always uncomfortable knowing how much Google knew about you but in return you got everything for free. This has worked for the most part.The Paid services modelThe other end of the spectrum are the paid services typically driven off a "freemium" model. Evernote, Spotify, Dropbox and many others work this way. You get a basic service for free but it has its limitations. For a fee, all those restrictions get lifted and a premium product is offered to the customer.  This works too. It has a smaller audience for the paid services but it is not as reliant on ads and there are effectively two streams of income.And for everything else...A few months ago, I wrote about my utopian dream of a paid, ad-free Gmail service. Since then, I have been surprised by the number of hits for that post and the number of people who search for it (thanks Google Analytics). I would pay for one such service as I would for an ad-free Facebook.I pay $9.99 for my Spotify premium service as I do for my XM Satellite Radio on my car. I pay because they offer a value addition over free services. And I wish many free services on the Internet came with a paid option. Like my dear Google Reader. Google has been slowly but steadily shutting down a bunch of its lesser used services and focusing on a few key pieces. I admire that strategy and see it as the right move for Google. But at the same time, it has a cult following that is taking to Twitter and to all of the Internet and complaining about it. I will miss it badly and really wish Google offered a paid option at at $2.99 a month for those who want to keep the service. That would pay for the developers who maintain it and readers like me, happy. Finding the sweet spotIt all comes down to finding the sweet spot between managing development effort and monetizing the product. If the product is worth something to customer, they will pay for it. And a one size fits all solution may not work for everything. I see Evernote, Spotify and Dropbox as good examples of offering a compelling free product and a paid model that is actually worth upgrading to.Google knows much better than I do at why they shut down Reader. And I can see their strategy as being sound. Just that the dedicated users of a good product lose out on something very integral to their daily life. With no compelling products to replace it, this loss will be felt.