I’d been meaning to write about how it would probably be better for everyone if the APA made Jobs for Philosophers free for everyone, and simply upped the cost of advertising in it to cover the cost of distributing it to members. I was going to make some fairly general arguments about how it’s a good idea to avoid micropayments, and how the extra advertising cost to departments would probably be worth it because more people would see the ad, but actually there’s a much simpler reason for making JFP freely available.

If JFP was free it would mean that when the program that checks logins is not working, people could still access the advertisements. (As you might have guessed, as I’m writing this it is not working.) If you’re not going to run a 24/7 operation, and obviously it would be absurd for the APA to do this, then you shouldn’t have important services be vulnerable to these simple software errors that can’t be corrected until the office reopens.

I should add that the APA do lots of good things to help job seekers around this time of year. It’s a lot easier to find jobs in America than in Australia or Britain. In part that’s because it’s a larger market, but in part it’s because of the coordination the APA helps provide. I just think it would make their service better (and easier to provide) if they didn’t complicate the process by requiring sign-in to get to the ads. In general I think classifieds services should not require payment to view the ads. You should be trying to maximise the number of viewers of the ads, and payments just restrict it. It seems to be it would be a very rare case where it is not maximally efficient to make the sellers pay anything beyond the marginal distribution cost, if you charge even that.