The Future Won't Be Free

When I take a photo with my film camera, I don't expect to get it developed for free ... then cameras went digital.

When I ask a musician to fill my house with music, I don't expect him to do it for free ... then came radio (and then recordings, etc, etc)

Technology can remove limitations.

20 years ago, the two cheapest ways to mass-transmit ideas were television and newspapers. With the Television, advertising dollars allowed the user to buy the connection and get content for free. The newspaper model required the consumer to buy both the content AND the supply chain, but the costs were low enough and advantages large enough that newspapers prospered.

Now we have the Internet, and content follows the Television cost model. Ideas have little markup now - server costs, bandwidth, and time. And time isn't even worth that much! If you demand the user to pay you for your time, you're up against thousands of people screaming on their own soap boxes for free. Are you really offering something so special that someone couldn't get it on a site sponsored by advertising?

The future WILL be free because sites have already figured out how to monetize free with advertising money. If the dead-tree papers can't figure it out soon, they're going to find themselves with a big paywall and no eyeballs. For instance, it's very telling that Murdoch sites still show their 'paywall' content if you're referred by Google News

Articles like this half realise that something has changed, that something is failing in the copyright-oriented way of funding production. But what is their conclusion? "Let's pretend it is not real, let's just go back to how things used to be." -- ultimately they completely fail to understand or adjust.

There is a simple fact: The benefit of the internet and the mechanism of copyright are severely, fundamentally, inescapably conflicted. What copyright restrains is exactly the good the internet offers. The intelligent thing to do is devise other ways of supporting production, better suited to the realities.

That's a straw man. Even today, we might expect to see todays news and the past month news for free - but stuff like archive access and feature content is often behind pay-walls.

As long as the marginal cost of something can be covered by advertising, lead generation etc. it'll tend to be free. I'm pretty sure that the breakthrough of a simple micro-payment system would help generate so much income that it'll cause more content to be free (since there's more income to cover the marginal cost).

Now, I went through a conventional publisher for my last book, and I think they earned their money; they helped a whole lot with editing, and they got the book into nearly every suitable store that I've sampled (I'm so tickled when I go to fry's and see my book on the shelf)

but I never expected (and the publisher never promised) that i'd make anything like reasonable money off it. I didn't take an advance, so my co-author and I split 15% of the wholesale price (1/2 of the cover price) the first run was 4000 books, and the information therein has a short shelf life (it's not obsolete yet, but it will be in a year)

For the second edition, I'm kinda toying with the idea of releasing a free 'e-copy' in text or PDF after we've passed X revenue (Sure, I'm not doing this for the money, but the publisher is, and having them onboard and engaged results in more credibility for me.)

I don't have a good idea of how many other people do this, but I imagine it is a lot. Perhaps the secret to a good business model in the digital age is to replicate Steve's 'Reality Distortion Field'. Because, as one of the suckers, I can tell you it really does work.

The phenomenon of giving everything away was largely confined to startups, most of which failed, some of which settled for meager profits compared to traditional companies, and a few of which (Google, Facebook) generated revenue models and brand equity that would be the envy of any news organization.

I do think he's right that the pendulum has been swinging away from free recently, but that's only because it's now becoming clearer what business models work as free and what don't. And even today, a lot more works as free than used to.

We still need people covering the news, the basic fact gathering. However, facts aren't copyrightable. The rest is opinion, and it's just not as expensive anymore.

Newsweek is in trouble.

I don't buy newspapers and I'd be insulted if cafeteria that has those papers lying around would charge me for reading it.

My personal opinion is that news will become a utility, like electricity or water, payed for with taxes.