Search News: Wired’s Chris Anderson Gives it Away For Free
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Written By Noah Mallin | December 17, 2008 | Share This
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The ironic setting for The Long Tail author Chris Anderson’s talk today was the Wired Store here in New York City, his magazine’s very cool mecca of pricey Wired-approved goodies. I’ll give them credit for not Hammacher-Schlemmering the place up by calling every item “The World’s Best…”
The setting was ironic because Anderson was previewing his latest book, coming out next year. Although if you read Wired it was more of a review as his basic thesis was laid out in his cover article “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business.”
Anderson weaves a convincing argument that while the last century was about the inflationary monetary value associated with goods and services our new century is all about the deflationary world of digital. While one might be tempted to look at their paycheck and mutter “No kidding” Anderson believes that there’s more to this than dollars and cents. Though we covered this earlier in the year when the Wired article came out, Anderson had some new wrinkles to share.
In his view, free is not a marketing trick – rather it’s the inevitable consequence of the world’s most perfect market – the Internet. His thesis goes that everything in the physical world that can be made digital will be. Everything that is digital wants to be free (not Toby Keith free but no charge free).
Anderson listed the different types of “free” online and marketers would do well to pay attention to them.
1) Ad supported in which third party advertisers basically supplement whatever cost there is to operating the online entity. The best example of this is Google search.
2) Freemium, in which 95 percent of what you do is free but 5% of users are willing to pay for something extra, which subsidizes everyone else. This is what LinkedIn does by charging recruiters and businesses for more access and to reach people without being linked.
3) The gift economy, in which no money changes hands (though there may be another type of transaction). This is essentially how Wikipedia operates.
For the most part marketers live in the world of number 1, but the increasing usage of social media and the ability for sites like Wikipedia and blogs to rank well in search results have meant that more energy and attention is being paid to 3.
Freemium from a marketing perspective is most impactful when dealing with the nitty-gritty of driving customers. Sites that put up too much of their offerings behind walls that can only be breached via credit card have a more difficult time driving traffic and ranking well.
Getting back to the idea of the gift economy, understanding why people are doing things online that other people were traditionally paid for can help to understand how it could benefit your brand. Anderson puts it simply – people blog or update Wikipedia or upload videos to YouTube because it’s fun, it can be a form of self-expression that’s personally fulfilling, and it can enhance the status of the person doing it. Often it’s a combination of all of these things.
It’s important to keep this in mind when approaching bloggers or attempting to market in social media spaces. Don’t assume that a blogger is striving for ‘legitimacy” or to make a buck.
Thoughts? Comments? Brickbats? Follow me on Twiiter at @nmallin.
Topics: Advertising: Online, Blogging, Conferences & Events, ECommerce, Google, Media Convergence, Search: News, Social Media, Technology, Wikipedia |
The concept of Gift Economy was born at the Burning Man arts festival, which not surprisingly is frequented by most of the very same tech community that is creating these tools. Gifting is also popular on Craigslist (with its barter and free pages) and on sites like Freecycle.com. It’s a very subversive way of creating a new world where the economy is based on barter and gifting. But, we have to wonder, in the interim, how are we bloggers and gifters going to eat?
[…] they listened to Chris Anderson’s talk yesterday they would know that bloggers write for a variety of reasons which can include money, enjoyment, […]