Free: The Future of a Radical Price
Chris Anderson
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 1401322905
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The New York Times bestselling author heralds the future of business in Free.
In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Far more than a promotional gimmick, Free is a business strategy that may well be essential to a company's survival.
The costs associated with the growing online economy are trending toward zero at an incredible rate. Never in the course of human history have the primary inputs to an industrial economy fallen in price so fast and for so long. Just think that in 1961, a single transistor cost $10; now Intel's latest chip has two billion transistors and sells for $300 (or 0.000015 cents per transistor--effectively too cheap to price). The traditional economics of scarcity just don't apply to bandwidth, processing power, and hard-drive storage.
Yet this is just one engine behind the new Free, a reality that goes beyond a marketing gimmick or a cross-subsidy. Anderson also points to the growth of the reputation economy; explains different models for unleashing the power of Free; and shows how to compete when your competitors are giving away what you're trying to sell.
In Free, Chris Anderson explores this radical idea for the new global economy and demonstrates how this revolutionary price can be harnessed for the benefit of consumers and businesses alike.
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everything, but nothing for enough that we have essentially created an economy as big as a good-sized country around the price of $0.00. How did this happen and where is it going? That’s the central question of this book. For me, it started with a loose end in The Long Tail. My first book was about the new shape of consumer demand, when everything is available and we can choose from the infinite aisle rather than just the best-seller bin. The abundant marketplace of the Long Tail was enabled by
turning into a black hole of spending, remained profitable. It competed with Google’s free by becoming even more free—getting first to the inevitable end point of unlimited capacity at no cost. Yahoo “rounded down” and it paid off. * * * HOW CAN AN EXCLUSIVE CONFERENCE REMAIN PRICEY IF IT’S FREE ONLINE? One ticket to TED, the invite-only conference on tech, entertainment, and design, costs $6,000. Each year, CEOs, Hollywood elite, and ex-Presidents flock to a resort in California
away from them is making that more difficult. This is the paradox that worries Schmidt. We could be at a moment where the short-term negative consequences of de-monetization are felt before the long-term positive effects. Could free, rather than making us all richer, instead make just a few of us superrich? From the billionaire boss at the Citadel of free, this may seem like an ironic observation, but it’s important to Google that there are lots of winners, because those other winners will pay
shelves. But the market for digital books—audio-books, ebooks, and Web downloads—is growing fast, mostly to satisfy demands that physical books cannot, from the need for something you can consume while driving to the need for something you can get instantaneously, wherever you are. Most free book models are based on freemium, one way or another. Whether it’s a limited-time free download of a few chapters, or the whole thing in a well-formatted PDF available forever, the digital form is a way to
WALL-E (where people become corpulent blobs as they pass their days reclining in levitating pool loungers, drinks always at hand). In sci-fi circles (and for the more fringy techno-utopians) this is called “post-scarcity economics.” In that context, many of these novels are not just stories, they’re also book-length thought experiments about the consequences of expensive things becoming close to free. Take E. M. Forster’s 1909 short story “The Machine Stops.” One of the earliest examples of the