Is Chris Anderson's new book a complete load of codswallop,
or are we too afraid of the consequences to accept the truth?
Having finished reading the Long Tail author's new book ‘Free,
The Future of a Radical Price' this morning - the full £18.99 version rather
than the free abridged edition - this is the question now vexing me.
There is much to disagree with in the Wired editor's new book-of-big-ideas,
and Anderson
has had his fair share of criticism since its publication, not least from
fellow big idea toting author Malcolm ‘Tipping Point' Gladwell.
Indeed Anderson's
own thesis - "making money around free will be the future of business" - appears at
times to be contradicted in the book.
It seems to me having now read it, that Anderson doesn't suggest that free is the way
forward at all. In fact Anderson
says himself, though it takes until page 240, that "free may be the best price,
but it can't be the only one".
For all its talk of business models that embrace free, from
freemium, to time-limited, feature-limited, seat-limited and customer-type
limited strategies, along with the book's exploration of non-monetary attention
and reputation economics, at some point the only business model that works,
unsurprisingly perhaps, involves someone putting their hand in their pocket and
handing over a bit of hard-earned.
What the book lays on the line, and this is the bit media owners
know only too well and are currently tackling to lesser or greater degrees of success (predominantly
lesser it has to be said) - is that the current ad-funded model isn't working,
and getting people to pay for content online is a challenge that may prove
insurmountable.
As a journalist, who has a career and mortgage invested in
the paid-for model, I'll happily admit that I have a vested interest in maintaining
the status quo.
If Anderson is right and the natural price point of bits is
dragged inexorably toward zero, and the digital age consigns my chosen career
to the dustbin - as the machine-age did for manual labour - it will not do so now, nor did it then, without the
equally natural human instinct to fight against it.
Whether that fight is won or lost, one thing the media
industry must do well if it is to survive is adhere to an irrefutable Anderson maxim: "Sooner
or later every company is going to have to figure out how to use Free or
compete with Free, one way or another." Let battle commence.
