Why Chris Anderson & Malcolm Gladwell Are Both Wrong About FREE!
So far this is my favorite piece on the “Freemium” concept. It comes via Union Square ventures a vc based in NYC.
Click Here To Find Out Why Chris Anderson & Malcolm Gladwell Are Wrong!
Introduction (Via UnionSquare)
Anderson’s book points out that the cost of providing web services is declining as a result of open source software, commodity hardware, and cheap bandwidth. Gladwell agrees with the trend but notes that it is very expensive for YouTube to host video. Gladwell and Anderson also traded visions of the future of the media business, with Anderson arguing that content was becoming commoditized and Gladwell holding up the Wall Street Journal’s paid web subscription as an example of paid for premium content. Ultimately the debate veered into a discussion of the economics of abundance, pitting overly enthusiastic cyber utopians against cynical and perhaps self interested, defenders of current media business models.
Additional Excerpts (Via UnionSquare)
The debate was entertaining but not very satisfying. Malcolm’s examples were too narrow and not compelling. The WSJ gets away with a subscription, for the moment, because their users bill it to their corporate credit card. YouTube has real costs because of its enormous scale, and the structure of the pharmaceutical industry has little to do with purely digital products on the web.
Chris, on the other hand, drifts too easily into an imagined world of abundance where economics (for lack of scarcity) will no longer be able to describe human behavior. I agree with Chris that the economics of the web are fundamentally different, but I agree with Malcolm that the basic laws of economics still apply.
My frustration with the debate about Free is that it seems like a last ditch effort to fit the internet economy into the familiar framework of the industrial economy. That isn’t going to work. Free is not a pricing strategy, a marketing strategy, or the inevitable consequence of a market with low variable costs. It’s a symptom of a much more fundamental economic shift.
Final Thoughts (Via Union Square)
Since Craigslist collapsed a multibillion dollar classified advertising business into a fabulously profitable $100,000,000 business, perhaps we should be talking about the potential deflationary impact of more “zero billion dollar” businesses. As the radical efficiencies of the web seep into more sectors of the economy, and participants in social networks exchange attention instead of dollars, will governments at all levels need to make do with less tax revenue? That’s a scary thought in an era of high deficits unless traditional governments can learn from the efficent governance systems of social networks and provide more for less.
Click Here To Find Out Why Chris Anderson & Malcolm Gladwell Are Wrong!
