Chris Anderson’s new book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price” (Hyperion; $26.99) on why everything should be free:
In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay with laws and locks, but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.
Information wants to be free in the same way that life wants to spread and water wants to run downhill.
From the consumer’s perspective, there is a huge difference between cheap and free. Give a product away, and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you’re in an entirely different business. . . . The truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another.
Malcolm Gladwell refutes his arguments in a new piece in the New Yorker, entitled Priced to Sell: Is free the future?:
When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer. That’s the magic of Free psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down,” “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number. A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube’s bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars.
So how does YouTube bring in revenue? Well, it tries to sell advertisements alongside its videos. The problem is that the videos attracted by psychological Free—pirated material, cat videos, and other forms of user-generated content—are not the sort of thing that advertisers want to be associated with. In order to sell advertising, YouTube has had to buy the rights to professionally produced content, such as television shows and movies. Credit Suisse put the cost of those licenses in 2009 at roughly two hundred and sixty million dollars. For Anderson, YouTube illustrates the principle that Free removes the necessity of aesthetic judgment. (As he puts it, YouTube proves that “crap is in the eye of the beholder.”) But, in order to make money, YouTube has been obliged to pay for programs that aren’t crap.
Broadcast television—the original practitioner of Free—is struggling. But premium cable, with its stiff monthly charges for specialty content, is doing just fine.
There's a lot of appeal in Anderson's argument. I do want stuff for free.
BUT I also want to get paid. And as someone who writes, creates content and generally profits from her ideas, I can't really see how I'll ever pay the rent in the future that Anderson foresees. His model tells us to build an audience and monetize it later -- by selling t-shirts, presumably. But I'm a writer and I want to make my living selling writing, not t-shirts.
Both Gladwell and Anderson are speculating, of course. Yes, lots of people are getting ideas and art for free on the web. Partly because they can. But also partly because they sick of the big corporations making money hand over fist. They feel robbed and see nothing wrong with taking a little back. If you've already paid for Sgt Pepper on vinyl, 8-track, cassette and CD, maybe you don't think you really need to fork out money to get an MP3. If your cable bill is several hundred dollars a month, maybe you figure that it's perfectly reasonable to download a torrent of show you watched. I think many people feel that they have already paid or that the money only goes to making big corporations bigger.
Would they be more willing to pay if they felt the money was going to the actual artists who created it? If it wasn't going to make the rich richer but would keep workers working? I think it would make a huge difference to people.
The obvious question is "why Anderson's book, Free, free?"
More from Chris Anderson:
