stick to what you're good at!

[waider]

As I typed the preceeding entry, it occurred to me that my current plans require me to seek new accomodation before my current lease expires. Basically, I'm not paying out almost half my take-home in rent, and I strongly suspect the landlord will want to put the rent up again. So I went to DAFT, which is where I found the current digs, and discovered on logging in that they wanted me to update my profile.

With details of things I'd be interested in being spammed about.

Strangely, none of them are remotely related to finding accomodation. They've decided, as so many companies do, that now that they have a captive audience of some sort, it's time to turn on the firehose of unrelated crap in a bid to squeeze some more money out of what is currently a good, clean system. Of course, once you start adding the unrelated crap, your good, clean system becomes a mess, and you go the way of at least one of my previous employers - people can't find what they want on your website, so they go somewhere else. Sigh.

Comments

[ikkyu2.livejournal.com]

I've noticed this happen a lot in the last 3 or 4 years or so. The idea is to build, as you say, a captive user base, by providing services; then there is a 6 month period or so of extracting monies by the means you describe, then pretty much give up on maintaining the whole endeavor.

I've seen enough sites do this that I suspect it's probably being taught at business school as a viable business model.