economist阅读写作分析--The end of the free lunch-again--3.24--tuziduidui [复制链接]

注解： 暂时只有简单的两种颜色， 红色：自己觉得会有用的词语或者句子什么的

                                橙色：个人一些看法

Internet companies

The end of the free lunch—again

Mar 19th 2009
From The Economist print edition

The demise of a popular but unsustainable business modelnow seems inevitable

（这句在AW中就可以使用了，sth. but adj. seems….but用在句中也是不错的，这样可以缩写句子。）

Illustration by S. Kambayashi

“IN RECENT years, consumers have become used to feasting on onlinefreebies of all sorts: news, share quotes, music, e-mail and even speedyinternet access.（此处分号后并列结构的使用值得学习和借鉴。） These days,however, dotcoms are not making news with yet more free offerings, but withlay-offs—and with announcements that they are to start charging for theirservices.” These words appeared in The Economist in April 2001, butthey’re just as applicable today. During the dotcom boom, the idea got aboutthat there could be such a thing as a free lunch, or at least free internetservices. Firms sprang upto offer content and services online, in the hope that they would eventually beable to “monetise” the resulting millions of “eyeballs” by selling advertising.Things did not work out that way, though, and the result was the dotcom crash.Companies tried other business models, such as charging customers for access,but very few succeeded in getting people to pay up.

Then it happened all over again, startingin 2004 with the listing of Google on the stockmarket, which inflated a new “Web 2.0” bubble.Google’s ability to place small, targeted text advertisements next tointernet-search results, and on other websites, meant that many of the businessmodels thought to have been killed by the dotcom bust now rose from the grave. It seemed there was indeed moneyto be made from internet advertising, provided you could target it accurately—a problem that could beconveniently outsourced to Google. The only reason ithad not worked the first time around, it was generally agreed, was a shortageof broadband connections.（我觉得是个不错的，可以在AW中使用的句型，比如some reasons+一个定语修饰，一个插入语，是什么什么。可以让文章并不是简单的出现A is B的句型） The pursuit of eyeballs beganagain, and a series of new internet stars emerged: MySpace, YouTube, Facebookand now Twitter. Each provided a free service in order to attract a largeaudience that would then—at some unspecified point in the future—attract largeamounts of advertising revenue. It had workedfor Google, after all. The free lunch was back.

Now reality is reasserting itself once more, with familiar results. Thenumber of companies that can be sustained by revenues from internet advertisingturns out to be much smaller than many people thought, and Silicon Valley seemsto be entering another “nuclear winter” (see article).

Internet companies are again laying people off, scaling back, shuttingdown, trying to sell themselves to deep-pocketed industry giants, or talking ofcharging for their content or services.(个人认为是挺好的并列结构，可以学习) Some Web 2.0 darlings (MySpace, YouTube) managed to find buyersbefore the bubble burst, thus passing theproblem of finding a profitable business model to someone else (NewsCorporation and Google, respectively). But quite how Facebook or Twitter willbe able to make enough money to keep the lights on for their millions of usersremains unclear.（倒装句的使用） Facebook has had several stabsat a solution, most recently with a scheme called Facebook Connect. Twitter’sfounders had planned to forget about revenues until 2010, but the site nowseems to be preparing for the inclusion of advertising.

（现在还不是很熟悉AW的题库，不过觉得像facebook, twitter这些信息可以先积累着，还算是比较新的东东的，说不定哪天就有用了。）

The bill, sir

The idea that you can give things away online, and hope that advertisingrevenue will somehow materialise later on, undoubtedlyappeals to users, （可以在AW里面使用的undoubtedly appeal to sb.）who enjoy freeservices as a result. There is business logic to it, too. The nature of theinternet means that the barrier to entry for new companies is very low—indeed,thanks to technological improvements, it is even lower in the Web 2.0 era thanit was in the dotcom era. The internet also allows companies to exploit networkeffects to attract and retain users very quickly and cheaply. So it is notsurprising that rival search engines, social networks or video-sharing sitesgive their services away in order to attract users, and put the difficultquestion of how to make money to one side. If you worry too much about arevenue model early on, you risk being left behind.

Ultimately, though,（结尾段比较常见的用法了） every business needsrevenues—and advertising, it transpires, is not going to provide enough. Freecontent and services were a beguiling idea. But the lesson of two internetbubbles is that somebody somewhere is going to have to pick up the tab forlunch.