Building on Chris Anderson’s article Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business I wanted to try to summarise some of the freeconomics models that have been tried out so far (if I’ve missed any, please feel free to add them in the comments). For the purposes of this summary I’m ignoring products or services [...]

Free distribution of digital content (music, books, visual art) is embraced by—and benefits—customers because it gives them access to a much wider range of content. This is because the restrictions on the amount of content they could get—based on how much they can financially afford—is eliminated. Instead of money, the bottleneck becomes the time required [...]

In every industry I’ve worked in, people have been obsessively concerned about underpricing their products. Underpricing, they say, devalues the products (because, as Chris Anderson pointed out recently, they make the mistake that “the only way to measure value is with money”). This “underpricing=bad” argument might have some mileage for products made of atoms, but [...]

When text on the web is free and abundant (even more so than music and images), why should a person pay for it? In other words, how can writers (and by “writers”, I’m including writers of fiction, screenplays, academic theory, graphic novels, journalism etc.—the whole kit and caboodle) make money when what they write is [...]

With Chris Anderson’s next book “Free” due to be previewed on the front cover of Wired magazine next week, there’s a lot of chatter about how the way to make money in the future is to give stuff away. That’s a gross simplification of the economics of free, but it basically sums it up. Kevin [...]