Part 1

Hello, this is Steve Kaufmann here. Today, I would like to talk about the Internet and making things free. This is Steve, thelinquist.blogs.com.

At thelinguist.com which is our website for learning English and which will soon become LingQ.com, at thelinguist.com we offer 14 days free. A free trial of 14 days but we do require people to put down their credit card even though if within 14 days they don’t like the system they will not be charged. We regularly get very indignant emails from people saying “How can you say it’s free when you ask me to put down my credit card?” The point is though that we are not interested in offering free access to our Website including access to a tutor, including the ability to write and have your writing corrected; in other words, the full-range of services that we offer free for 14 days. We do not do this because we love everybody out there on the Internet. We do not do it because everyone out there is our friend. We do it because we hope that during this 14-day period people who use our site free of charge that many of them will like the service and will want to stay. Someone who doesn’t have a credit card or who is unwilling to give us their credit card information is also unlikely to pay to be a member of The Linguist after the 14 days. We are not interested in providing free language training to people around the world out of the goodness of heart. To me that is normal; that is normal behavior. I do things free for my family and friends. I lend money free of interest to my family and friends if the need arises; for people that I don’t know, I charge. Because at The Linguist we have employees who also don’t work for free, we have to make sure that we can earn some revenue from our activities in order to pay the employees. The Linguist is so far from earning a profit at this point that really doesn’t come into it yet; however, obviously, if we were able to make a profit with The Linguist we would be very happy to do so.

Now, there is this culture on the Internet that things should be free. The link that I have put up on the blog post here will take you to a podcast by a Professor Baranick who talks about how through the Internet textbooks and course material will be made available free so that people all around the world can learn. Mr. Baranick is a very strong proponent of making this kind of material free. And that’s a very nice thing to do, but the fact is that Professor Baranick is a professor at Rice University so he has an income. He is not volunteering his time. He has an income and so his efforts in promoting free access to course material and so forth is, in a way, being paid for by the people who contribute to Rice University. Similarly on his podcast, there is a very obvious advertisement for BMW the car manufacturer, who are identified as sponsoring his podcast in the interest of spreading ideas and knowledge around the world. One could even argue that people who buy BMW cars and therefore pay for all the salaries of all of the people who work at BMW and also contribute to the profit that BMW makes so that BMW can pay taxes and invest in research and also reward their shareholders, it is these people who are also helping to make this kind of content free.

My point is that in most cases, “free” simply means free to me but somebody else is paying. If we use Skype free it is because somewhere someone else is paying for the additional Skype services or advertisers are paying to advertise but somewhere along the line someone has to be paying. I mean, the air we breathe is free, the feelings we have and the thoughts we have and the friendships we have, these are all free. Much of nature is free but once we get into consuming things, food or books or music or whatever else, most of the people who provide these services themselves need to consume goods and services so they like to get paid.

It’s very important that when we think of free that we understand what “free” means. Very often “free” means I will give you something for free in the hope that you will do something else. If I watch a movie on television and it has advertisements then the hope is that I watched the movie for free but somehow I’ll be persuaded to buy whatever products are being advertised. If you get a free gift in your cornflakes box the hope is that this so-called free gift will induce you to buy the box of cornflakes so that when you buy the cornflakes, of course, you are paying for your free gift.

In LingQ we will do things a little differently than we have done at The Linguist in that we will offer some free services and content. It will be limited but it will not require a credit card. Our hope is that the new LingQ is sufficiently easier to understand and that a large number of people will take advantage of the free services and amongst those people a smaller percentage will agree that it is worthwhile paying for the expanded services within LingQ. So, again, the free that we offer is not out of the goodness of our hearts but it is in order to attract as many users as we can.