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Making the "Free" Business Model Work In a Tough Economy
Randy Savage writes "With venture capital on hold and advertising revenue down, the WSJ discusses where online business models might go. 'Over the past decade, we have built a country-sized economy online where the default price is zero — nothing, nada, zip. Digital goods — from music and video to Wikipedia — can be produced and distributed at virtually no marginal cost, and so, by the laws of economics, price has gone the same way, to $0.00. For the Google Generation, the Internet is the land of the free. '"
The business model is very simple: Give the product away and make it up in volume!
Joking aside, there has never been a better time for free products. As the strength of McDonalds and Walmart demonstrates, consumers are looking for the cheapest prices to help reduce their costs. Even consumers who are financially okay at the moment are reducing costs to prepare for any eventuality.
If you look at the market, you see a lot of giveaways that used to be unthinkable. McDonalds is doing "free latte mondays" to draw business away from Starbucks while Denny's is giving away a free Grand Slam breakfast to each visitor tomorrow in an attempt to push coupon books out to customers. (Thus encouraging them to think about the large and inexpensive breakfast they can get there.)
The key is that these businesses have solid revenue models that their giveaways promote. Web-based businesses are in a slightly tighter pickel. With advertising budgets getting slashed across the board, ad-supported websites are feeling the same pinch as print and broadcast media. Now is the time to find alternative revenue streams such as premium content to back their free services. Things like selling larger downloadable versions of free web games or state tax filings to go with free Federal filings.
These are potentially sustainable models in the Internet age. They preserve the free service concept and allow consumers to evaluate the product(s). Customers then have a difficult time not paying for Premium features or content with real value. The "real value" is the key, of course. Which is something the internet has been missing with its premium features. (Video Game DLC is particularly bad in this area.)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
from TFA:
> It's a consumer's paradise: The Web has become the biggest store in history...
Telecom companies implementing tiered service models, destroying Net Neutrality will fix that temporary glitch. While they are at it, lets hand-out to them some public bail out tax^H^H^H printed money for the privilege.
There is no "free" business model.
There are forms of benefit that don't come from giving objects in exchange for money.
This is exactly why the net needs a viable model for micropayments. And yes, I know, the abundance fan's response is that "money is obsolete, we don't need it any more"... People still want SOMETHING for their work, and while there have been all sorts of proposals, ranging from whuffie to all sorts of other trust metrics, micropayments would work just as well and would allow a tie-in to the remains of the real world economy.
Yes, free can beat not free. Can't argue with that.
You have to realise, however, that sometimes it's not the fact that it's free, it's the fact that's it's available at all.
Pirates don't care about international borders, different launch dates for different countries, how old the content is, etc, etc.
If you want to sell your content, don't build artificial borders that prevents us from buying it.
As an example: how long has the iTunes store been running? Why can't the labels tear sell their content to everyone on the planet? It's your own mess of contracts and licenses, figure it out for yourselves and leave us out of it.
Didn't I hear this once before, when the dotcom era ended and all the "free" businesses had to start making money? Realisticly all the "techy" parts like servers and bandwidth should keep getting cheaper, so that helps. And in a hostile market, marketing goes first as it's an "expense", then you lose your customers, then the marketing budget comes back. When else are you going to fight for your customers than when they're scarce? The alledged death of ad revenue is heavily overhyped.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
The real appeal of free software is in reducing infrastructure costs. Just like roads, they don't normally generate money themselves, but they make it easier for businesses to interact and generate wealth!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
So, all those datacentres buying hardware and using electricity, are they free too?
Sooner or later there is a cost, and free services have one big problem for long term survivability, where's the profit?
A great free service may be fun, might even be useful, but sooner or later down the chain someone needs to be paid.
Or are all web developers working for no pay these days?
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
A good place to start would be for Slashdot to charge for a plaintext(or ODF?) version of a user's comment history, on a per-download basis.
Maybe they could adjust the price of them according to per K of M of data. I would gladly pay 3 bucks a hit to use that feature.
Not me, I don't care about Karma.
Posting anonymously to protect my Karma.
FTA:
Debian Linux would have cost at least $1.9B to produce in a private environment. $1.9B may be smaller than what Microsoft spends on Windows, but it is a hell of a lot more money than "marginal cost."
Let's also not forget the fact that there are few, if any, desktop OSS apps that are as robust as, say, the Adobe suite of products or Microsoft Office.
It does OSS no service by giving people the impression that it is cheap and easy to produce. In fact, that is downright self-destructive because such an impression will make people behave even more like cheapskates. "What do you mean I should buy a supported license? I don't need to help pay for no stinkin R&D!! This stuff is supposed to be free? Why am I paying you anyway?!"
People in software development are the only ones I can think of who promote the idea that they should be paid less (e.g. this story) and that most of their colleagues suck (e.g. thedailywtf).
We live in the information age. Information is easy to duplicate, to transport, to store, to look up. Information is cheaper than dirt. The old business models based on scarcity or rarity or production difficulty that work well for physical goods just do not work for selling information.
An information source will attract consumers. The better the source, the more people are attracted to it. Just look at Slashdot. Slashdot attracts so many readers that when it links to an article, it can bring that article's server to it's knees. Also, the more/better the information on your site, the more you will attract even more information. It's a positive feedback loop. Placing any sort of restrictions on the information (copyright limits, DRM, country boundaries, release dates, etc) breaks the positive feedback system, and drives people to other sources.
So, the question is, how do you get these consumers to "let off dollars" as the saying goes. As much as I hate to say it, the answer is advertising. People have been watching movies and shows for free for decades on ad based television channels. People have been listening to free music for even longer, on ad based radio. They will do the same thing for ad based internet sites.
The trick is that your ads must not get in the way of the consumer getting to the information that they want. If you break that popularity feedback loop, you'll drive consumers away. It has to be subtle enough to not interfere.
Google is a good example of how to do it. Quality information, and on the right hand side subtle, non interfering (and I might add, relevant) ads.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
You can't sell that! Karma can only be portioned out by the cosmos. -Homer
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Create something with a large codebase that other people want to use in their own free software application or game, like a very nice raytracing engine for example.
Now here's the catch; nobody likes to learn a large codebase because it takes a lot of time. Especialy free software developpers because they usualy don't have a lot of time on their hands as they are doing projects in their spare time. So here's what you do to get money; sell detailed documentation and maps of the code of your project. ThÃt would be your product, not the source code.
If you make sure your code is not ugly and unreadable then you'll probably sell a lot of documentation. People that create free software would probably not hasitate at all as they buy OpenGL, C, C++ and ruby books as well.
Your product is completely ethical in terms of free software. It is not nessecary for a developper to buy your documentation, but they will probably do it out of respect and because they just want to save time. In essence, you are selling someone time. Isn't that just the greatest thing?
Here be signatures
Check out diydrones.com. He sells a super cheap circuit board that interoperates with stuff most of his customers already have. What's another $30 when you've already invested $300? He gives away the source code & plans, but puts a ton of effort in publicity doing odd projects like the blimp autopilot, posting frequent firmware updates, & growing a social network around the product.
The P2P rip doesn't generate the $150 million dollars needed to produce "Monsters vs. Aliens" or the $40 million needed for the low budget "Serenity."
If the geek wants to see more films that appeal to him he has to find a realistic solution to the problem of how to pay for them.
Otherwise production simply ends or shifts to more profitable markets. "High School Musical" and a "Hotel for Dogs."
Is that MC is 0. It isn't, though it may be small. It also doesn't cover fixed costs at all. If I spend $1,000,000 writing the next killer app and give it away for the cost of distribution, it's pretty easy to see I'm out the original $1,000,000. If I give it away for literally free, I'm out the original $1,000,000 and I've picked up the cost of distribution, too.
Prices drop to MC in the face of (perfect) competition, yes, but before that happens consumers are paying more than cost, and willingly so because the product is worth more to them than they pay for it. If you don't have credible evidence customers will do that, you don't invest in developing the product.
The only reason free software works is massive charity on the part of developers and project managers who get non-monetary benefits out of being involved in the project, or in some cases, corporate sponsorship.
Note, too, that business segments which involve perfect competition are not generally places you want to be. You are a commodity. Everybody, top to bottom, gets squeezed.
wikipedia is leaching off of us [citation needed]
... there, fixed that for you.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
I have about $4000 investment in instruments and gear.
I produce for free. The music I make requires no investment. I pay nothing to record it. I pay nothing to master it. I pay only a small web hosting fee to distribute it.
My music is free to anyone who wants to download it and listen. If someone wants to use my music for commercial purposes, they must negotiate a usage fee.
They're using their grammar skills there.