July 2009
9 posts
Ex-NYT exec: Newpapers' "mass delusion" about paid...
Nytimes.com general manager Vivian Schiller, now at NPR, tells Newsweek that “news is a commodity”: “I am a staunch believer that people will not in large numbers pay for news content online. It’s almost like there’s mass delusion going on in the industry-They’re saying we really really need it, that we didn’t put up a pay wall 15 years ago, so...
Felix Salmon on why opinion should be free
Reuters columnist Felix Salmon on why his company shouldn’t buy Breakingviews, with its paywall-only model: “The genius of Reuters setting up a commentary team is that we can offer our content at a marginal cost of zero. Once the commentary is available on the wire, for the benefit of subscribers to the terminals, those subscribers want it made available as widely as possible for free...
5 business models for social media startups
A good roundup of revenue models from Mashable, with examples and interviews with entrepreneurs in each. The five are: Freemium, Affiliate, Subscription, Advertising and Virtual Goods.
Free news aggregators
Want more Free news than I’m collecting here? You’re in luck—two services have started providing it.
Eqentia, a new semantic news aggregator, has a very good page on “Freeconomics”. You have to sign the first time to read the stories, but after that it’s quick and, yes, free.
Meanwhile, Seth Godin has set up a Squidoo page on “The Free Debate”,...
Interesting responses to my CNN op-ed on Google,...
Last week I wrote a piece for CNN wondering if the Obama adminstration’s tough new line on antitrust could end up limiting Google’s use of Free to gain share in new markets (because it’s subsidizing that entry with monopoly profits from search ads). Dana Wagner, Google’s chief antitrust council, replied on the Google policy blog. Sample: “It is true that if a company...
NYT reviews FREE again, this time with feeling
Virginia Postrel, who is smart and both techno- and econo-literate, has a long review of FREE in the the Sunday NY Times Book Review section. She describes it as “stimulating but not uncomfortably challenging,” concluding: ““No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” Samuel Johnson said, and that attitude has had a good two- century run. But the Web is full of...
Good WSJ review of FREE
Long and thoughtful review in the WSJ by Jeremy Philips, vice president of News Corp: Sample: “To be sure, businesses with pricing power don’t always exercise it. Millions of people would be willing to pay for their favorite social networks, but the potent network effect that derives from scale has made free an irresistible strategy. In the future, the “freemium” model that...
You know what's really "reckless and lazy"?
A Janet Maslin NYT review of FREE and CHEAP (by Ellen Ruppel Shell) makes much of the fact that we describe Dan Ariely experiments differently, proving us to be untrustworthy. Or, perhaps, they were different experiments. A simple Google search would have revealed that it’s the latter.
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)
