Collecting Underpants

When something cool like Storehouse launches, free of charge and free of ads, I always get a bad feeling in my gut. There must be some kind of catch in the future. At some point, something will have to change. They’ll either have to start charging money for something, or start selling ads against the content, or get acquired by one of the giants (Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo).

Charging money up front is no panacea. Everpix is a perfect example of that — they charged money for subscriptions and they saw growth, but they didn’t grow fast enough for the revenue to put them in the black. But at least when you signed up and committed to the service, you could see how they wanted to make it work financially. With Storehouse, we have no idea.

★ Thursday, 16 January 2014