I would pay at least $10 a month for a good search engine, like google when it first started. Maybe that web is gone, so it could not work, but in the old days one could copy almost any error message and get a great explanation of the problem.
I bet at least a million other people would too. Maybe $10 million a month in revenue could support a user focused search engine?
Whenever anyone talks about business ideas, there's always some person that says "Oh, well I will pay so much for it!" and when you implement...they don't pay. That's probably been the downfall of many a web service when they realize its cheap for a person to say that they might pay so much for something, but hard for them to open their purse when it's time.
I agree that the vast majority won't pay. 99% of people won't pay for news. 1% will pay for the WSJ or New York times. 0.001% pay $24,000 per year for a Bloomberg terminal. I think search engines could differentiate similarly. Maybe they have and I just don't know about the good paid options.
What's key to selling? Is it to pander to customer's wants? or make something so good to make it practically a need that money means little and customers will gamble?
