We are building a web-based app for group scheduling. Our competitors are offering their services for free. When2meet and Calendly are free of charge and free of advertisements. Doodle is free but introduced advertisements after some time. Google Calendar and Outlook are free of charge for personal use. They charge a fee for corporate use. There is however no extra fee for Google Calendar’s “Find a Time” feature which is what we are competing with.
For fast and easy group scheduling we want to be able to automatically pull availabilities from our users’ calendars. In addition, we envision an integration into a messenger app. Both the calendar and the text messages feel like private spaces. Neither include advertisements today as users would feel compromised in their privacy.
The advertisement revenue model in general elicits mixed emotions across users, most find it to be irritating and intrusive on their privacy as they know their online behavior is being monitored and analyzed for the sake of personalized advertisement. Often customers will feel better about advertisement in spaces where they are looking to buy things, like Amazon and Google Shopping.
One might reduce the negative implications of online advertisement by either making customers pay for services online (like reading the New York Times) or by constraining them to a specific location on the website (no pop-ups!). As mentioned in the podcast episode, it is a hard problem to solve: the internet is for free and if you have only ever known the internet as begin for free it is hard to make you pay for the same service after some time. Ads have been a way out of this dilemma, but I am hoping that the advertising revenue model is not here to stay.
I would like to believe that we can find a way for users to pay a fair share for the services that people are working hard to provide to them so that they can get paid for their work. Having an ads free internet, TV, metro, airplane seems like a dream. But maybe we secretly like advertisement and that it tells us what to buy and show us what is new and trendy in the moment. Maybe going back to a no-ads era is not as desirable as we think and maybe spamming internet users with ads is more honest than unknowingly selling their data.
Back to our scheduling app: Even though we will not be making money with a free online scheduling tool, I think that placement of advertisement will make people loose trust in our service and make them reluctant to share their calendar with us. Another obvious business model choice is monetizing user data, which is ethically maybe even more controversial. Business model: tbd.
