Chris Anderson’s latest Wired article and video podcast explores the notion of free content – a big challenge for anyone basing a sales model on on providing digital content for the consumer. “Every industry that becomes digital eventually becomes free”, is his conclusion: case studies are the super-profitable $billion technology companies like Google and Yahoo! who give away content, software, storage, services, information for free. He argues that because of sites like Wikipedia and Craigslist and because of social networking; open source; UGC; and the blogosphere, we have created a “gift economy”: a nascent economic model that doesn’t exist any here else, where no money changes hands. The labour is provided for free, and there’s no expectation of payment.
[Its odd that Wired Magazine doesn’t let me embed Chris’s content for free into my own blog…]
Digital eventually becomes free
