Will everything be free?

Or, more specifically, will every (Web 2.0 or not) service and application be free?

Many Web startups and new services concentrate on collecting a very large user base, and only after thinking about monetizing, which is inevitably ads or has a very strong ads component. That way, they never get customers, only users, because they never get money from them. This uneases me a bit, maybe because I'm not a big fan of marketing and publicity, or maybe because I can't conceive the online publicity model to scale into the de-facto monetizing solution for the Web.

That and I've started following the "There Is No Such Thing As A Free Lunch" motto long ago (I like the Portuguese variant a lot: NHAG - "Não Há Almoços Grátis"), so I don't trust "free" completely anymore.

Well, this was just an oppinion of mine that I summarized quickly as an introduction to point you, my dear reader, to this article written by Alex Iskold on ReadWriteWeb: The Danger of Free. The article also focuses on the effects of free products in the economy and market competition.

I might get back on the subject with more of my own words later. More goodies after the jump.