gratis

It’s time to talk about free. Actually, we’ve been talking about free for the ten plus years that I have been your net columnist. As you have no doubt discovered by now, vanishingly few of the sites that I commend to your attention ask you to pay money for the use of their content. Strictly in terms of dollars and cents, most of the sites we discuss here are functionally free. However, there are economic transactions of sorts going on between you and any site that you visit as a result of reading this column—only they take place in the currencies of the net. You “pay” attention (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_economy) by clicking over to a site. And if you like what you see on a site, you might mention it to friends, or link to it on your blog or from your website, enhancing its reputation. And since many businesses and netizens have found ways to convert “wealth” in the attention and reputation economies into the kind of wealth that they can deposit in banks, maybe we need to come to a new understanding of free.

The spark for this month’s exercise in freethinking is the publication of a controversial book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price ( amazon.com/Free-Future-Radical-Chris-Anderson/dp/1401322905 ), by Chris Anderson thelongtail.com. Anderson, as the editor of Wired ( wired.com) and author of the influential The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (amazon.com/Long-Tail-Future-Business-Selling/dp/1401302378), is one of the Pundits-General of the new century. You may recall that back in 2006, Anderson pointed out the under-exploited potential of niche markets. While bestselling books, movies, and CDs will inevitably yield big profits, products that appeal to smaller and more diverse audiences can command a significant market share. These products form the eponymous “long tail”; it was Anderson’s insight that businesses that can find a way to store and sell them (think Amazon and Netflix) will prosper. Now he’s back with Free, thinking very hard about how to make money by giving stuff away for nothing.

Anderson lists four ways this can occur.

Direct Cross Subsidies. These are offered to entice you to pay for something else. For instance, as long as you pay off your credit card bill on time, it’s free, right? Wrong. Retailers must pay your credit card company, and they build that extra cost into the price you pay. Here’s another: you can listen to a giveaway audiobook version of Free by clicking over to Audible.com (Audible link). While you are nosing around the site trying to figure out how to get your free download, Audible hopes that you might be tempted to buy another audiobook.

Three Party Markets. You know this one: advertising. When you turn the radio on, it doesn’t cost you anything; neither does over-the-air television. The advertisers buy space from the programmers who offer free programming so that you will buy from the advertisers. Magazines and newspapers, while not exactly free, were able to keep the cost to their readers to a minimum thanks to ads. Want to know why newspapers are an endangered species? It’s because you sold your car on Craigslist (craigslist.org).

Freemiums. These are all over the web. Offer a free service or product to everyone and anyone. Get them to depend on it. Then offer a more useful version of the same service and charge for it. According to Anderson, web entrepreneurs have discovered a Five Percent Rule: if 5 percent of the users pay for the premium product they can subsidize the rest of us.

Non-monetary markets. At least that’s what Anderson calls them. I think using the word market here is kind of shaky. In this catchall category Anderson lumps what I would call the sharenet with piracy. I may be naïve, but I think there are many, many more people creating sites to share their knowledge or enthusiasms, to express themselves, or just to make the net (and the world) a better place than there are people ripping other people off. Why do the altruists share what is theirs with the rest of us? In some cases, it may be to participate in the attention and reputation economies, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve written a site up in this column only to have the webmaster email me in astonishment and gratitude that I’d ferreted out their pet projects and thought them worthy of mention. Are we talking about economics or self-actualization here?

It occurred to me to inventory some of my own storehouse of free products, services, and sites and sort them according to Anderson’s definitions. Here’s a caveat: human behavior is over-motivated, and anything on the list that follows may have been designed to achieve more than one goal.

subsidy

The Baen Free Library ( baen.com/library ) is an example of the direct cross subsidy model. As Eric Flint, the “First Librarian” of the library writes, “I will make no bones about it. . . . We expect this Baen Free Library to make us money by selling books. How? As I said above, for the same reason that any kind of book distribution which provides free copies to people has always, throughout the history of publishing, eventually rebounded to the benefit of the author.”

For that matter, the innumerable writers who are posting previously published work on their websites are probably doing so in the hopes that you will look for their upcoming work in books or magazines. The best place to find who is giving away what in our little corner of literature is the amazing Free Speculative Fiction Online (http://www.freesfonline.de). And then there are the legion of podcasters, many—but not all—of whom hope that by posting their audiofiction on sites like Podiobooks (http://www.podiobooks.com) that they can entice listeners to buy their books or editors to buy their unpublished manuscripts.

three party markets

Google (www.google.com), of course, is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of internet advertising, which is how it can provide its incomparable free search engine. If you’re Google-phobic for some reason, know that both Yahoo (www.yahoo.com) and Microsoft’s latest effort, Bing (www.bing.com), which finish second and third in the search sweepstakes, are also totally creatures of advertising.

Closer to home, popular blog io9 (www.io9.com), whose parent company is Gawker Media (www.gawker.com), is filled with ads for genre movies and games, as befitting a media-centric site. And while some might accuse the site formerly known as Scifi, Syfy (www.syfy.com), of being one huge commercial for its television parent, automobile and electronic advertisers think enough of its content to pay for ads there.

freemium

If you’re like me, then you take a starshipload of digital photos, some of which may be of interest to your family, friends, or even the world at large. I’m no great photographer, but I have some famous pals and I enjoy taking snaps of them. I share these with the world at Flickr (www.flickr.com/photos/jamespatrickkelly). Now a free account at flickr is a pretty good deal, but I have opted to pay twenty-five dollars for the pro account, mostly so that I can have more than two hundred images accessible at a time.

As a sometime podcaster, I have had occasion to send humongous files via the net, files far too large to attach to email. With a free account on YouSendIt (www.yousendit.com), I can send files as large as 100 mb with a monthly limit of 1gb. This is more than enough for me at the moment, although back when I was doing my StoryPod project on Audible, I regularly exceeded those limits and thus popped for the pro account at a cost of about a hundred dollars.

Although in its early days Skype (www.skype.com) often made your voice sound like a banjo, the price couldn’t be beat. As long as you’re calling another Skype user, it’s still free. And these days it’s one of the best ways to stay in touch by webcam. The videophone is no longer science fiction! Before I got a cell phone, I used to use Skype and a laptop as my on-the-road phone and paid extra for the privilege of calling landlines and mobiles.

sharenet

Chances are that you’ve never heard of the media player I use every day. The VLC Media Player (www.videolan.org/vlc) was developed by VideoLAN, a project run by volunteers who produce open source software. It’s simple, bulletproof, and plays more formats than anything else I know. The folks at VideoLAN are part of the Free Software Movement (www.fsf.org) founded by Richard Stallman (www.stallman.org). And here we come to yet another kind of free, because free and open source software is not the same as freeware. Basically, freeware is free, but it can also be proprietary, in that the author put restriction on its use and can forbid any modifications and improvements. Free and open source software (FOSS) is not only free, but you can tinker with it and adapt it to your specific needs. I was interested to read that Anderson gives Stallman short shrift in his book. Stallman is a “firebrand” guilty of “ideological extremism” whose “Free Software Foundation had been trying to push the movement toward his own anticapitalist views.” And yet it seems to me that the altruism of Stallman and the Free Software Foundation is at least as potent a force on the net as the market forces that Anderson is describing.

We’ll talk more about these matters in the next installment.

exit

If you want to consider Chris Anderson’s arguments for yourself, I’m afraid that you’ll have to pay for the dead tree version of Free—or else take it out from the library. He gave the e-version away for five weeks back in July; one hundred and seventy thousand copies were downloaded. Maybe you know someone who has one of them? Or you could read some of it in a limited preview on Google Books, but there are many pages omitted. Or you could read other bits of it on the Wired site (www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free), where it ran as an article in February 2008. Or you could hunt down a pirate version—just don’t tell them Jim sent you.

Or you could listen to that unabridged version over on Audible at no cost. Let me check to see if it’s still there. Wait, what’s this? If you’d rather hear the abridged version, it will cost you $18.89!

Is this some kind of joke?