Google Bowing to Pressure of Paid Content

Google is the poster child for those who want to claim that free content is the future and that everyone has to give away what they produce to court “eyeballs” and the advertising they can generate. So why is it that in a number of ways, the company has recently been turning its back on literal free market theory? Is it that management has become inexplicably dumb? No, it’s because that executives at Google have always pushed to get what they can for free but realize that ultimately paying nothing may not be a workable business strategy.

Link to my BNET story about Google

Mediabistro and the Reputation Economy

You’ve heard of the New Economy. You’re heard of the Old Economy. There’s the Freemium Economy and the Link Economy and, as everyone knows after the past year, the Crashing Economy. But now we have a new invention from WebMediaBrands in its guise as MediaBistro: the Reputation Economy:

BNET Media story

Linking and Free Content? It's the Old Features Vs. Benefits

Here's a link to a post of mine on BNET Media that you might find interesting - how the difference between free and paid content in discussion can often become an issue of confusing features versus benefits in marketing.

I had an epiphany while reading Virginia Postrel’s New York Times Sunday Book Review piece on Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Postrel was going through what has become a fairly common discussion of the book and the ideas of cross-subsidy (giving away in one place to make money in another), the infinitesimal cost of distribution, and the exploding number of suppliers of content. Suddenly I realize that publishers have largely been going about the free versus paid debate in completely the wrong manner.

Rest of the post...

"Free" Author Using Wikipedia Without Attribution [UPDATE]

In a story that restores your post Postmodernist faith in irony, Wired editor Chris Anderson, one of the supporters of giving away chunks of content free and then making money selling a small group of people something else, extensively used Wikimedia as a source in his book "Free" without attribution.

Anderson told us, "this is my screwup... I feel terrible about it." The lifted work was "mostly historical asides and nothing central to the book." But history is hardly simple to document, and it would seem a book on free products would be significantly diminished without its passages on the famous "free lunch" of the 19th-century saloon, or the origin of the phrase "there's no such thing as a free lunch."

Anyway, what's the big deal? After all, information wants to be free, right? Oh, and you can buy Anderson's book in many places. The list price is $26.99. Can we get a discount for the stuff he, uh, appropriated?

[UPDATE: Ah, but wait, there's more. Much more. Plus a side case of someone accusing The View's Elizabeth Hasselbeck of plagiarizing.]

Giving Writing Away

In this blog, I've been following the topic of giving away content - not that there is a single answer, but because we all need to understand the dynamics. And now there's another view at The Long Tail. Chris Anderson, who wrote the book about the concept of selling small amounts to target audiences, actually refers to a commentary from Dilbert cartoonist and author Scott Adams in last week's Wall Street Journal. (Atually, you should read the Adams piece itself, as it has insight from direct experience and is funny, to boot. If you don't have a WSJ subscription, try finding this at your local public library.) Here's a particularly important passage:

A few years ago I tried an experiment where I put the entire text of my book, "God's Debris," on the Internet for free, after sales of the hard copy and its sequel, "The Religion War" slowed. My hope was that the people who liked the free e-book would buy the sequel. According to my fan mail, people loved the free book. I know they loved it because they emailed to ask when the sequel would also be available for free. For readers of my non-Dilbert books, I inadvertently set the market value for my work at zero. Oops.

In other words, giving away free content doesn't always help a writer, photographer, cartoonist, graphic artist, or other creative, though sometimes it does. As Adams writes, "Free is more complicated than you think." Understanding the new market dynamics is going to take a lot of experimentation and consideration - and a lot of discussion among those of us in these industries. The minute I think I have the obvious and easy answer is the minute I should figure that I'm definitely not getting it.

On the Radiohead and the Booker Prize

There's a bit more information now - of varying quality - on Radiohead's experiment in letting people set their own price for the group's new album. That's important for writers to follow, because many of us will have to find ways of making our own markets and success independent of publishers who keep ratcheting down payments to authors while they still try to get how to make money on the Internet.

According to a Forbes article, many people are still pirating the new Radiohead album, even though they could go to the site and get a legitimate copy for free if they wanted to:

On the first day that Radiohead's latest became available, around 240,000 users downloaded the album from copyright-infringing peer-to-peer BitTorrent sources, according to Big Champagne, a Los-Angeles-based company that tracks illegal downloading on the Internet. Over the following days, the file was downloaded about 100,000 more times each day—adding up to more than 500,000 total illegal downloads.

That's less than the 1.2 million legitimate online sales of the album reported by the British Web site Gigwise.com. But Eric Garland, Big Champagne's chief executive, says illegal file-sharing is likely to overtake legal downloads in the coming weeks, given that many of those 1.2 million legitimate sales were pre-orders taken during the 10 days between when the band announced the album and its actual release last Thursday.

Garland suggests that the real culprit is habit - they go to their favorite BitTorrent sites and download in the way they're used to doing.

However, even with lots of pirating, consider the economics. According to a London Times article (and we'll get to the main part of the article in a minute), an Internet survey of about 3,000 people who bought the Radiohead album suggested that most paid an average of £4. Although this won't be particularly accurate, it's the best numbers possible: a rough total of £4.8 million on the album, all going to the band. Given the economics of regular record deals and distribution, I think they made a whole lot more this way. The real test will be whether they do the same on their next album.

But what does this have to do with the Man Booker Prize? Because it plans to make the novels on its short list available for free online:

The downloads will not impact on sales, it is thought. If readers like a novel tasted on the Internet, they may just be inspired to buy the actual book.

Journalist and science fiction author Cory Doctorow has said for a while, now, that making his books available for free online has increase his actual sales. As I said, this is something that every writer will have to face. Will it be the necessary free part of freelance?