ME exec editor Tim Green looks at Chris Anderson's new book and the reaction to it...
Last week saw the UK publication of Chris Anderson’s long-awaited new book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price.
In it, Anderson (who wrote The Long Tail, you might recall) describes how the ever-shrinking costs of digital content - and its limitless duplication by users - is making it impossible to charge for the stuff.
He goes on to outline the pain this is causing the gate-holders of the traditional media, like newspapers, broadcasters and ME magazine (alright, he doesn't name us, but trust me we think about it all the time).
Now, this book has been talked about for years, and it's worth remarking upon that it's being published just as the 'inevitability of free' is finally being questioned.
Earlier this year, big corporations (in the person of Rupert Murdoch) dared to suggest that subscriptions could return for premium content.
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Meanwhile, the recession got people wondering if advertising dollars could ever pay for all this free stuff.
Now, entertainingly enough, the very eloquent Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point and, like Anderson, a persuasive commentator on cultural changes) has joined the refuseniks. He laid into Free with a gleeful attack in The New Yorker.
Chief among his objections was the fact that it's big corps like Google and Amazon that most want the information to be free. He asks: "Why are the self-interested motives of powerful companies being elevated to a philosophical principle?"
I haven't read 'Free' yet, so can't really wade in. However, I do know that mobile is making a lot of the running in this area.
Last week, I met with Mobango, which (like GetJar) provides a marketplace for companies that want to give their apps away and monetise them later. Mobango makes money by charging for extra visibility, and it seems to be working - its monthly downloads were running at 3.5m last year; now they're at 10m.
Of course, it's one thing to charge corporates for site presence, but when you can get your own consumers to do so, even better. Which brings us to arguably the cleverest 'monetise free' firm of them all, Flirtomatic.
Last week it revealed Flirt-words – a kind of adwords that lets users bid to have their profile come up when other members search on 'hot', 'babe' or 'intellectual' (okay, perhaps not the latter).
It's another of Flirtomatic's 'ego services' to file alongside paying to delete negative ratings or revealing admirers' details.
Chris Anderson's Free costs £16.95 by the way.
