In his ZDNet column yesterday, Dana Gardner argued that businesses moving toward free online ad-supported content need faster and more powerful back-end systems. Why?
Because, increasingly, companies like AOL and Shopzilla are creating their incomes from the ads generated by page-views and communications services access. Same for carriers serving up content to cell phones. Same for transaction-based services. Same for applications as services.
So when a server takes 4 seconds to deliver a data-laden Web page, extracting data from a variety of sources, it ends up costing millions of dollars over a period of a few months in lost revenue to many more businesses. Making the page appear in 1 second is now mission critical.
Comment. I don't see these pressures on academic sites providing scholarly OA. Is it because ad revenue is never a large part of their business model? Is it because users visiting a site for research purposes are more likely to wait for the content than click on ads and forget why they came?
Posted by
Peter Suber at 8/08/2006 08:21:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
