Chris Anderson: Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

Have the laws of economics really changed? Almost everything free on the internet is cross-subsidized by advertising. Since television has being doing this for about 50 years, I don't see how this is the "future of business". More like an effective business method has gained much wider applicability.

An excellent article. "Invest in needed disposables" is always good advice and seems, to me, to be the real point of the article.<p>Another, more morbid analog to the Gilette example, is why it's always good to invest in lead and copper when the country goes to war. FMJ ammunition suddenly becomes a much-needed and much expended commodity and the raw materials prices sky rocket.

I once thought I would have a career in media, but I switched to software in part because I realized that my customer was going to be corporations, and the product was audience attention. It saddens me that ads are invading the software world too.<p>Advertisements are not a neutral way to make money. That model rewards massive infrastructure investment, control of information distribution, and overall low quality of the actual product.<p>It's very strange that one of Facebook's big problems is that their content is too interesting and meaningful to their users.

At the OReilly Tools of Change publishing conference I just went to, Tim OReilly gave a great talk on "Free is more complicated than you think". The old school publishers that don't use the web nearly as well as OReilly are shaking in the boots because of things like Wikipedia.<p>They just don't get it.<p>Chris is 100% right here.

<a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/webstartups.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.paulgraham.com/webstartups.html</a><p>"There's something interesting happening right now. Startups are undergoing the same transformation that technology does when it becomes cheaper."

I love "freemium" business models, but only when the negative externalities aren't seen by the "users of the basic version" and especially when the positive externalities _are_ seen by the "users of the basic version".

The money always comes from somewhere, even it's now twice- or thrice-removed.<p>Follow the money.

"we now have a handy way to convert from reputation (PageRank) to attention (traffic) to money (ads)"<p>... on the attention economy (previously on hn)

google sell advertisement, not email accounts google sell advertisement, not end user applications google sell advertisement and to do so they attrack the audience by offering free things ... the idea itself it very simple, the brilliant thing is, google kept the audience hooked<p>google's ecommerce model is a by the book case, offer free content and services and sell ads<p>moral is, google didnt start by, we will offer this for free and they will come, they must have started by we wonna sell ads on the web, how can we make ppl come<p>if they do it any other way they will eventually vanish

Anyone want to buy some old dot-com business models?

Highly recommended read.