Hi all
I think this post on my website might interest some
http://voidtitan.com/treating_your_website_as_a_private_good_or_a_public_goodThe argument I make in the post is that depending on whether you treat your website (or blog) as a private good or as a public good has implications for who your "costumers" are, and how you act.
From the perspective of advertisers websites are very much private goods. They are rival since there is only a certain amount of advertising space on each website and they are exclusive since an owner of a website have exclusive control over who gets to advertise on their website and who doesn’t. This perspective means that the costumers of the private good websites are not the visitors but the advertisers and the product being sold is not relevant information but eyeballs (or rather clickthroughs). Treating you website as a private good means being the middleman between advertisers and potential costumers of the product being advertised.
This starkly contrasts with the websites owner’s treatment of his visitors if (s)he views his website as a public good. In this perspective the owner is not middleman but instead provider of value to the visitors of the website.
