Bill Rice

Tagged: seth godin RSS

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  Bill Rice 1:32 pm on July 1, 2009 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Chris Anderson, Free, Malcolm Gladwell, seth godin, Tipping Point, Wired, YouTube   

  What is Free Doing to Our Economy? 

  Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine and author of Long Tail, has stirred a good debate on the future of “Free.”

  His to be released book,  Free: The Future of a Radical Price is about to hit the bookstores and Malcolm Gladwell (author of Outliers
  and The Tipping Point) is already taking him to task. Gladwell’s challenge to Anderson’s premise is really one that argues the economic problems with a “free” economy, not really that it is not an eventually in the “future of radical pricing.” I don’t really dispute that argument. I also totally agree with the inherent yield of free:

  So how does YouTube bring in revenue? Well, it tries to sell advertisements alongside its videos. The problem is that the videos attracted by psychological Free—pirated material, cat videos, and other forms of user-generated content—are not the sort of thing that advertisers want to be associated with. In order to sell advertising, YouTube has had to buy the rights to professionally produced content, such as television shows and movies.

  However, I am inclined to support Seth Godin’s argument:

  Who cares if it does? It is. It’s happening. The world will change around it, because the world has no choice. I’m sorry if that’s inconvenient, but it’s true.

  This begs the question…What do we do about it? If consumer behavior has adopted the expectation how do businesses adjust and avoid the YouTube consequence (i.e., “Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year.” Gladwell)?

  I think Dave Winer and Jay Rosen is giving some good thought to this issue in his essays on Rebooting The News.

  I look forward to seeing if Chris Anderson has any conclusions in Free: The Future of a Radical Price. I suspect as the editor of a print magazine that charges, he is thinking hard about solutions.

  Related articles by Zemanta

  • Give ‘em something for nothing and make your fortune (guardian.co.uk)
  • Gladwell, Anderson, Godin, and Bad Brains (idiomag.com)
  • Malcolm Gladwell vs Chris Anderson: a very intellectual bust up (timesonline.typepad.com)
  • Condé Nast’s Grumpy East Coast-West Coast Feud (gawker.com)
  • Malcolm Gladwell Challenges the Idea of “Free” (tech.slashdot.org)

  

  Bill Rice, and genuinechris are discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    genuinechris 11:59 am on July 15, 2009 Permalink

    Dan Kennedy and disciples are having the hardest time. Consumer goods, consumerism, and all of that stuff is a dead letter. Clay Shirky's “here comes everyone,” kinda hinted at it: we'll have tribes, if I'm in Sonia Simone's tribe, or if I'm in, say “Dan Kennedy's” tribe.

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    Bill Rice 12:03 pm on July 15, 2009 Permalink

    Yes, our economic assumptions seem to be in a radical shift. Winners? Those who figure it out, and they always do.

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  Bill Rice 9:17 am on April 11, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: bill rice (5), chris brogan (2), dave winer (5), inspiration (3), joel spolsky (3), seth godin, stowe boyd (2), twitter (10)   

  Who Inspires You? 

  I have been running hard this week. Early wake-ups and late shut-downs. Running out of gas…

  So, I popped open my RSS feedreader looking for inspiration (I suppose).

  And, I found it in Chris Brogan’s “Inspiration and Origins“:

  My big point: none of us are originals. It’s okay. And I’ve DEFINITELY done it myself, where I’ve thought something WAS my thought, only to find out that I was synthesizing something I read a few days back, or a conversation I had (Did that famously badly once, to a friend I love, and had to rescind). But if you KNOW you’re going to riff off someone, give a little link love and be done with it. Fair?

  This is who inspires me:

  • Dave Winer: I hate his politics. I often hate the way he treats past or non-friends. But, he has an amazing genius to him. I read every word. I love his pictures on Flickr. He seeds thought and software. He gets user-first design. I wish I knew him better.
  • Stowe Boyd: I love his brevity. Master of 140 character poetry.
  • Seth Godin: A storyteller. Creates simple, short stories that if absorbed yield big results.
  • Joel Spolsky: Hero of the ISV (Independent Software Vendor). Master of effective software development methodology.
  • Twitter: I find more who inspire me everyday.

  Who inspires you?