As the editor of Wired magazine and a champion of the online life, you have just written a controversial book, “Free: The Future of a Radical Price,” that suggests that companies can profit by giving away digital services and products. It’s paradoxical. By giving away products to lots of people, you can make money. Free is the greatest marketing tool there is. It allows you to expose the biggest audience to what you do, and then the question is: Who’s going to pay? Google is the poster child of free. It’s one of the most profitable companies in America, but it doesn’t show up on your credit-card statement.
Several critics have already pointed out flaws in your argument, citing YouTube as an example of a mass sensation that is losing enormous sums of money. YouTube is owned by Google and today loses money. But Google has achieved something extraordinary, which is a network-television-size audience. The problem with YouTube is not that it costs too much to deliver that video but that we have not found a way to migrate television advertising as quickly as the television audience has migrated.
Why not just sell subscriptions, as in the HBO model, which proves that people are willing to pay for quality?
The original concept of the information superhighway from the early ’90s was going to be exactly that. We’re now 15 years past that, and the marketplace has spoken. The marketplace wants free. Consumers want free, and if you decide to set up a subscription service, then your competitor will make a free one.
read the rest > http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19fob-q4-t.html?ref=technology
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment