FREE/Long Tail

Moby's best selling track is his free one

Moby writes to Bob Lefsetz: “Here’s something funny: the best selling itunes track is ‘shot in the back of the head’. Why is that funny? Because its the track we’ve been giving away for free for the last 2 months and that we’re still givng away for free.” (thanks to Mitch Joel for the link)

Malcolm Gladwell review of Free in The New Yorker

A long review of Free by Malcolm Gladwell. Like many journalists, he finds Free unsettling: “Anderson is very good at paragraphs like this—with its reassuring arc from “bloodbath” to “salvation.” His advice is pithy, his tone uncompromising, and his subject matter perfectly timed for a moment when old-line content providers are desperate for answers. That said, it is not entirely clear what distinction is being marked between “paying people to get other people to write” and paying people to write.”“

Boston Globe's excellent Ideas section reviews Free

Drake Bennett writes a long, thoughtful and, well, mixed review of Free. Sample: “Duncan Watts, a network theorist and a principal research scientist at Yahoo! Research [says] “He’s taking perfectly reasonable and in themselves interesting and valid observations and expanding them into a grand theory, but it turns out that the grand theory can’t sustain itself,” Watts says. “To the extent that what he’s saying is true it’s not new and to the extent that it’s new it’s not true.””

Turning digital pennies into dimes

NBC’s Jeff Zucker once complained about having to trade “analog dollars for digital pennies”. Now at least it’s dimes. Bloomberg reports that top shows such as the Simpson now get higher ad rates on Hulu than broadcast. From the article: ““This is about scarcity,” Poltrack said. “All of the networks who are now streaming online have multiple advertisers competing for a small supply of premium programs. That premium content is what advertisers want.””

"Is Free News Really Worth the Price?"

An NYT appeal from the “last Reuters correspondent known to have to sent dispatches by carrier pigeon many years ago from Matabeleland”: Please pay for your newspaper. It’s better than Twitter.

How Free vs. Paid is playing out in personal finance

PaidContent has a good piece analyzing the various free and freemium models on the personal finance sites: “In the battle for the online personal finance market, free has become the status quo. Both startup Mint.com and rival Quicken Online have amassed more than one million members each by charging zilch for their services. Now, though, both companies are seriously exploring charging for some features.”
….
“For Quicken, charging would represent something of a turnabout. In October, the company dropped the $2.99 a month subscription fee that was part of the launch of Quicken Online. Stanley says the company discovered that there was an “overwhelming bias” towards a free offering and decided to embrace it. There’s no question, however, that while Quicken was charging for its product, Mint managed to capture much of the buzz around the online personal-money-management market.”

Socialtext now free for up to 50 users

From the press release: “Socialtext, the leading provider of Enterprise 2.0 solutions, today announced the availability of Socialtext Free 50, a new free offering aimed at mainstream use for up to 50 people within an organization to collaborate using Socialtext’s social software platform. Employees can join or create their own private collaboration networks by using their work email address at Socialtext.com. In addition to the new free offering, the company announced the immediate availability of SocialCalc, the first social spreadsheet program that simplifies version control, reduces errors and increases productivity for distributed teams.”

Good Freemium examples

A roundup of Freemium best practice on the web: “Here are a couple of services that have found the right formula for success when it comes to charging their members. There might be some valuable lessons learned by examining these successful services to see how they managed to get their users to take out their wallets rather than their pitchforks and torches.”

What to do with "infinite bandwidth"

A Boston Consulting Group analyst describes how to apply abundance thinking to bandwidth: “Today, for example, radiologists don’t need to be located where the image is created. Images taken at a clinic where the patient is located are transmitted from the imaging machine to a distant image-analysis centre - an entirely new business made possible by increasing bandwidth at ever-falling costs. Other new businesses will follow: As the best physicians are brought online, diagnostic accuracy will improve; as researchers mine data history, the profession’s overall diagnostic skills will improve; and organizations that have the strongest network of specialists will gain the edge, because hospitals will be reluctant to switch to another network. Each is a revenue-generating opportunity.” [via TechCrunch]

An argument on why microbilling is better than Freemium

I disagree with this (I think the marketplace has already spoken: people hate microbilling, defined as a few cents or less), but the analysis here is worth reading: Sample: “But here’s one thing freemium fans can’t deny: in their model, a tiny minority of paid users subsidizes the service for everybody. It is this simple fact that makes the freemium model self-defeating, because, for the numbers to work, the price of the paid service must be set artificially high.”

Amazon's growing free Kindle book biz

From a note from Morris Rosenthal, who had done good research on Amazon Kindle sales; “One of the things that you might find interesting is the large number of free Kindle books that are flying off the shelves, classic out-of-copyright books that Amazon has provided, plus the number of 1 cent novels, uploaded by small publishers and self publisher in hopes of generating buzz for the print versions. Amazon has over 7,000 free classic titles for the device, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (free Kindle version) is currently the 38th most popular Kindle title.”

More data on sales effect of free books

From BoingBoing: “Brian F. O’Leary has posted slides updating his quantitative research on the effect of “piracy” and/or free giveaways on book-sales, done independently using data from O’Reilly and Random House (the largest tech publisher and general publisher in the world, respectively). The new slides, from the recent Book Expo America, expand the work with a larger data-set, and confirm the earlier findings that free downloads are broadly correlated with higher overall sales (though correlation is not causality!).”

The $0 iPhone

From TheStreet.com: “…Within hours of Apple’s announcement Monday that it was cutting the price of the old iPhone by half to $99, speculation arose that AT&T would eventually cut the price to $0.”

How $0 laptops could save media

Smart piece from Simon Dumenco in AdAge: “In other words, hardware makers may have no choice but to turn their internet devices into multi-tier-subscription-based media machines, because there will never again be enough margin in the basic price of the hardware. And the more we get used to the idea of essentially subscribing to media as a way to pay for hardware … well, the more hope there is for media.”

NYT on the Danish Free Newspaper bubble burst

From the NYT: “Since the economic crisis deepened last autumn, however, the free newspaper business has gone into free fall. Circulation in Europe, which accounts for more than two-thirds of the global total, has fallen by more than 10 percent, Mr. Bakker said, and dozens of titles have closed.”