High-Concept Internet 💿
We love free stuff in exchange for advertising—something proven by the enduring status of the early free internet providers Juno and NetZero.
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With the recent revival of MoviePass—an excellent example of what I call a “high-concept business,” a service that works in an unusual or indirect way—now is a great time to consider two of the greatest examples of high-concept businesses ever created—Juno and NetZero.
Throughout the late 1990s, companies started to emerge that aimed to replace internet service providers with inexpensive or even free alternatives that were paid for through the use of advertising and audience data. Juno’s entry, in August 1996, offered free access to email through proprietary software that was loaded with ads.
Email on Juno was intentionally limited—you could only receive about 35 kilobytes of data per message, for example—but all you needed to get online was a relatively recent computer, a modem, and a Juno CD-ROM, which was distributed in a way not unlike AOL’s extremely prevalent coasters.
NetZero, which came along a couple of years later, offered a similar promise of free or cheap internet access, and initially reinforced it through the use of an aggressive widget that put an ad on the screen every 15 to 30 seconds. It also tracked everything that users did to send you relevant ads to your surfing, something cofounder Ronald Burr said was a “win-win” for advertisers and consumers.
“The ad that comes to you is meaningful to you, and the advertiser is getting ads to the people who are more likely to be interested in the product,” he told the Los Angeles Times.
(Perhaps it’s for this reason that Juno eventually copped its model, especially since Hotmail had made Juno’s dial-up email approach irrelevant.)
These were not the first examples of a dial-in service that offered free internet access—the Free-Net concept had been around for a while but was text-based—but unlike prior examples, they had the benefit of lots of money from startups and investment firms, not unlike our friends at MoviePass.
As wild as it is that people put up with these data-siphoning, advertising-laden services in exchange for free internet, even more wild is the fact that both services are still around today. NetZero even offers 10 free hours a month of dial-up internet. Still. In 2023.
» Wanna learn more? Check out our 2018 piece comparing Juno and NetZero to the MoviePass model.