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The Long Tail A public diary on themes around my books

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July 28, 2006

Backlash coda

This is a fitting end to my tussle with the Wall Street Journal: a bLaugh cartoon, for which the caption reads:

Long Tail important thing. Thag must grok idea to make idea work. It say that markets conversations. Wait, no - that cluetrain. Long Tail claim there new marketplace at end of rainbow. Blog believe rainbow exist, but nobody else care.

Long ago, before Internet, Anderson man had long tail on body. Got tired of lug tail everywhere, so put online for auction. Caveman in Iowa bought cheap. Gomesaur came, want Anderson tail - but Anderson no have. Gomesaur attack Anderson, say Long Tail no exist.

Anderson kill Gomesaur with it own long tail. Gomesaur go extinct. Indiana Jones dig up long tail bone in next sequel. It make good movie.

The whole episode was an interesting and in many ways educational experience. The big lesson, as Rex Hammock points out, was the advantage of having a blog. The WSJ got the first word, but the conversation continued out here in the blogosphere, both in my comments and on other blogs thanks to the very classy decision of the WSJ editors to put a link to my response in a prominent box in Gomes' story. Gomes, not having his own blog (by WSJ policy perhaps), was forced to respond by asking blogger Nick Carr to post an email from him the next morning, which was too little, too late.

One of the main message from the blog commentary was that this was a debate on the margins of my thesis, missing the big point. After all, Gomes' three objections were: 1) the tail isn't yet bigger than the head, 2) the 98% rule isn't universal and 3) the tail, in percentage terms, still looks small. They respectively refer to 1) language only found in the jacket copy, not the book, 2) a passage only found in the introduction where I tell the history of how I began the process that led to the Long Tail observation and 3) something that isn't in the book at all, because I found it statistically meaningless.

My main point--that the Long Tail, both in terms of content and products available and the demand for them, is big and getting bigger--isn't really disputed by any of this and I was pleased to see how many people recognized this.

Erick Shonfeld from Business 2.0 (who coined the "nichebuster" phrase that I mention in the book), has a good day-after post that I think puts the whole thing in a clearer context:

[Gomes] takes issue with the suggestion that the long tail of goods and services made possible by the Internet will ever be bigger than the hits at the head of Anderson's now-famous power law curve. While that may be a popular misconception about the long tail argument, even Anderson says that is not the case and, in fact, long ago revised downward some of the startling data in his original Wired article. (For instance, instead of 57 percent of Amazon's sales coming from the long tail of books beyond the top 100,000 or so, it looks like it is really just about a quarter of its sales).

But the interesting question is not so much whether the tail is bigger than the head. It is not. The really interesting question is: How long can the tail get?

In other words, by eliminating the costs of inventory and allowing unlimited choice over the Internet, how niche can a product get and still be economic to produce and sell? The answer is you can now go a lot further down that curve.

And because there is now economic life further down the curve, niche products can turn into nichebusters and travel up the curve more easily than in the past.

That is what the book is really about.

Well put. In the end, I think that despite my disappointment with Gomes' piece, the subsequent debate was interesting and constructive, both for my theory and as a case study in the increasing power of blogs as a counterbalance to mainstream media. And of course there is the fact that debate is a good way to get attention, for which I thank Gomes. As the salvos flew yesterday I got news that my book, which is currently #10 on the WSJ non-fiction bestseller list, will move to #3 next week. Now I'm getting email from other authors asking if I can get Gomes to attack them, too.

Posted at 10:46 AM in On-topic | Permalink

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Comments

Hmmm. So in the end, the debate reduces the Long Tail analysis to the summary: as incremental inventory costs go to zero, retailers should carry more inventory.

Well, um, yeah. (But while hoping against hope for those 'nichebusters', do beware of cannibalization and ensure that your bloated inventory doesn't prevent your customers from finding the hits they had previously bought....)

But this does leave unanswered the more interesting, more difficult question: when should we carry more inventory in a given category, versus when should we branch out into a totally different category and carry fewer hits there? Hmmm.......

Posted by: Frank Deutschmann | July 28, 2006 at 11:54 AM

Chris,

Do you find it totally ironic that a journalist at a major newspaper might oppose the long tail theory? Newspaper circulation continues to shrink while blogs are expanding exponentially. Rather than depend on a few Editors for my news, I can seek out any one of a thousand experts to give me first-hand knowledge by visiting their blog. No offense to you but I'm sure that even Wired has noticed this. Stories that your journalists were once privy to are now available to anyone directly. The long tail of journalism seems to be blogging if you ask me.

Cheers, Doug

PS: You may have mentioned this in your book but I'm only up to the SNL portion right now.

Posted by: Doug Karr | July 28, 2006 at 01:23 PM

I have your book here, and don't quite understand how you can say you don't talk in it about the "tail being bigger than the head." This is what you say on page 8.

"Maybe hits are the wrong way to look at the business. There are, after all, a lot more non-hits than hits, and now both are equally available. What if the non-hits -- from healthy niche products to outright misses -- all together added up to a market as big as, if not bigger than, the hits themselves? The answer to that was clear: It

would radically transform some of the largest markets in the world."

Posted by: TC | July 28, 2006 at 02:25 PM

TC,

I think I've been pretty clear about this. When I'm talking about current data and the observed effects right now, the size of the tail is given by the data on page 23 (21%-40% depending on the market). In those few instances where I'm talking about the future, such as the jacket quote and the speculative "What if..." passage on page 8, I don't give any date as to when that day might arrive. Indeed, I'm sure in some markets we'll never get there (remember: my thesis is only that the Tail is big and getting bigger). The only market in which I've made any specific prediction (and even then only on this blog) is in music, where an extrapolation of the growth trends on Rhapsody over the past years suggest we'll hit the 50% Tail mark within five years.

Please don't do what Gomes did and confuse my statements about the present, which are all backed with hard data, with my speculations about the future. We can measure the present, and my book is focused on doing just that. But the future is only a prediction (although I naturally think mine is at least a well-informed one).

Chris

Posted by: Chris Anderson | July 28, 2006 at 03:42 PM

OK, but, I just went and re-read Gomes' column, and this is what he said about this subject. "In the book's main sections, Mr. Anderson writes that as things move online, sales of misses will increase -- so much so that they can equal or exceed the sales of hits. The latter is the book's showstopper proposition; it's mentioned twice on the book's jacket." Isn't he talking about the future, and not the present?

Posted by: tc | July 28, 2006 at 04:12 PM

TC,

If only he'd been clear about that. Unfortunately he compared a future-tense prediction with current data, and then, compounding things, compared my prediction about tail size with *his* definition of "tail" (using percentage terms, which I'd already rejected). That's just wrong.

Chris

Posted by: Chris Anderson | July 28, 2006 at 04:37 PM

Let me get this straight: your whole book slyly discusses the future, and then you whine, "I wish he'd [Gomes] been clear about [the future tense aspect]."

Nice.

Why is it that in Old Media, what's said is concrete and reliable, while in New Media, what's said needs to have all sorts of clarifications and additional restrictions and narrowing conditions placed on it to be meaningful? (And then, in the end, we find that the New Media proclamation of a New World Order is really just some restatement of some obvious narrow concept....)

Now that the Long Tail has been gutted into the inventory balance of supermarkets, time to move on.

Posted by: Frank Deutschmann | July 28, 2006 at 05:15 PM

And because there is now economic life further down the curve, niche products can turn into nichebusters and travel up the curve more easily than in the past.

So the really interesting area is "The Fat Middle" (c. Julian Bond 2006). That's where all the volatility happens.

Posted by: julian.bond | July 29, 2006 at 01:10 AM

Yes the mouth-watering middle is the interesting place, but no it isn't fat. If it were, it would have been noticed before now.

Posted by: John Dodds | July 29, 2006 at 02:12 AM

Am enjoying recent spate of books that demonstrate how 'data'--traditionally viewed as cold, unfeeling, lifeless- -is actually organic and alive and no longer the 'niche' province of wonks. This is a good thing. THE LONG TAIL and others in its 'family' are valuable beyond their individual topics and hypotheses. This literature extends a 'tail' of its own. I am interested in examining the trend of this particular tail and how it applies to education reform, specifically technology integration and civic engagement pedagogies such as service learning and social entrepreneurship. These 'modes' of learning create channels to disseminate 'modules' of curricula based on the spirit of inquiry and synthesis represented by the underlying message of books such as, THE LONG TAIL, THE TIPPING POINT, FREAKONOMICS, and more distant progenitors such as Thomas Stewart's work in Intellectual Capital. Field research in my area yields a following observation: inner city African American 6th graders display blinding facility with the mouse, yet need keyboarding reinforcement. Follow-up instruction will include drills to build that keyboarding ability. This ability will establish the code/text creation platform on which to build games their mouse-hands will play. The demanding nature of

code-creation strenthens students' textual capacity (reading, writing, research), a matter of grave concern to educators. Am very interested in any and all comments on how to develop and deploy strategies for aligning education practice with this post-contemporary theory exhibited by THE LONG TAIL and other books like it. It's time to bust the niche of 'education' by developing a spirit of academic entrepreneurship. The 'long tail' of such a movement would work wonders on critical issues like student motivation, the 'x' factor that drives all outcomes. bob bradley, tennessee state university director of technology integration. e-mail: [email protected]

Posted by: Bob Bradley | July 29, 2006 at 06:35 AM

The Wall St Journal a Old Media Publication criticising a New Media Theory how typical and sad ....

Posted by: Matt | July 29, 2006 at 02:02 PM

The answer is you can now go a lot further down that curve.

How far? Let's paraphrase an Army slogan: An Industry of One.

Posted by: Mike Abundo | July 30, 2006 at 07:51 PM

One of the things I think is missing in this discussion is that the "tail" is not simply (or only) an economic issue. The "value" of the tail is not the sum of it's economic value but the value of services/ideas each creates. In other words the way in which the individual niches is served creates different approaches, technologies, ideas - creating something not thought of before - ideas that can be applied further up the tail creating more value at the "head" as well.

Long-winded way of saying - "the future is at the fringe" and the fringe is in one of the niches. Looking for disruptive innovations? Looking for sustaining innovations? Look no further than the tail.

If nothing else, recognizing the tail exists and watching it, allows you to see what's next and apply it in the the "wider" niches closer to the head.

Posted by: Paul Hebert | July 31, 2006 at 05:29 AM

Funny how even arguments seemingly about entirely objective data can degenerate into subjective bickering. Witness the BLOG war set off by a WSJ journalist that has decided that Wired's Chris Anderson's "Long Tail" contentions are seriously flawed.

For my money, at one level this is merely another case of numbers lie and liars use numbers; but, on another, me thinks that, perhaps, that Mr Gomes protests too much. In other words, at least in light of Anderson's rejoinders, the Jounal's writer seems to be working awfully hard to discredit a cleaarly "disruptive" trend. Could it be that mainstream press wonks have a certain cross to bear, ox to gore, blog to flog...pick your old (or new wave) cliche....

http://silverbulleits.typepad.com/dcs/

Posted by: Doug | July 31, 2006 at 10:44 AM

My Comments on the Long Tail.

My old professor in college, used to comment on how few magazines there were in his days as a student. There were three books in the entire architecture school library.The glossy publications we know today helped to create the powerful names in the creative industries.

The image of the artist in the twentieth century has relied upon the notion of autographic art. The ideal of a romantic author is necessary to underpin creative jobs, as ‘copyright’ professions. Glossy architectural magazines are only employed to help propagate the myth. But many creative works are produced with some kind of plan, script or score, which is the opposite, to the notion of the single author. Many people can work together and augment the script.

Using digital technology, the cost of fixation and transmission of information has been reduced. People themselves can become ‘broadcasting facilities’. You can distribute the task of review over many individuals. The process of review is less formalised. It is almost 'out of control', to use the expression from Kevin Kelly's book.

Experts can be brought onboard for a couple of hours at a critical stage in a projects development. Data packets fly back and forth between dozens, hundreds and thousands of dispersed individuals. The ‘Forward key’ and the ‘Reply key’ in the email application are used to grow a gigantic network. The tendrils of this network seem to extend miles out into cyberspace. Like the image of the 17 mile long hering shole going to spawn.

With any large and distributed peer reviewing process, it is difficult to see individuals ‘making decisions‘. That is why a terrorist organisation is so difficult to predict, difficult to 'pin-point' after the acts. The digital blueprint is a patchwork of different fragments sewn together. Traditional law enforcement trains people to seek individuals, but the doesn't teach them to recognise a swarm effect.

In the future, payment for review of data will evolve with new concepts like Smart Money. This is the particular Long Tail, that I am interested in. Because it changes radically, the way in which design professions go about their business.

We are only beginning to see the emergence of new models though. Like the idea of a montly rental for access to all works of music in the world. Imagine paying a montly rental for access to all the best design brains in the world? Smart money will have very little resemblance to the money we know today. When packets of digital data allow for a two-way transaction to occur. Sophisticated instruments for re-embursement of the designer or artist.

The believe in individual authorship is very misleading in today’s environment. But are there weaknesses with the concept of de-centralised information production? Frederick Brooks also wrote a book called ‘The Mythical

Man Month’. In his famous book, Frederick first publicised the idea that adding more people to a project can make it progress even slower. Because the communications overhead between the individual members of the design team rises exponentially. Whereas the rise in work done is only linear.

Architects are needed more than ever, to define the components of the project which have conceptual integrity. To define a system of collaboration which uses clean interfaces between those components.I will give the last word to Tom Peters, an early commentator on the knowledge economy.

From his 1982 book, ‘In Search of Excellence‘.

“Most of the institutions that we spend time with are ensnared in massive reports that have been massaged by various staffs and sometimes, quite literally, hundreds of staffers. All the life is pressed out of the ideas; only an iota of personal accountability remains. Big companies seem to foster huge laboratory operations that produce papers and patents by the ton, but rarely new products. These companies are besieged by vast interlocking sets of committees and task forces that drive out creativity and block action. Work is governed by an absence of realism, spawned by staffs of people who haven’t made or sold, tried, tasted, or sometimes even seen the product, but instead, have learned about it from reading dry reports produced by other staffers.”

Brian O’ Hanlon.

Posted by: _oh | July 31, 2006 at 12:35 PM

I think the true power of "the long tail" is its ability to capture the imagination of the public. Clearly the social revolution implied by the growth of the long tail (or at the very least, retailers' increased interest in and willingness to stock the "misses" in the tail of the power curve) has already begun. As someone who grew up in the midst of all these changes (I'm 24), my own mental and cultural life has been fundamentally changed and enriched by the instant availability of a seemingly never-ending back catalog of music, images, and texts thanks to google, amazon, emusic, et al.

Posted by: mark | July 31, 2006 at 02:49 PM

PS- Chris, isn't it time to change your Blog's masthead.

"A public diary now published and on the way to becoming a bestselling book," while awkward, would be more accurate at this point. I read it on my vacation by the way, and you deserve the success. Cheers

Posted by: mark | July 31, 2006 at 02:52 PM

Actually the question of whether the tail is bigger than the head is not only easy to answer, it is not really too important. What is much more important (in ters of the impact on society and the economy) is the relative size and growth of profits from the tail. It's too bad that the debate has not been joined (and, perhaps, the data has not been collected, analyzed, or even generated) on this point

Posted by: Albert Halprin | July 31, 2006 at 02:53 PM

I am one of the co-authors (along with Erik Brynjolfsson and Jeffrey Hu) an early study on this phenomenon at MIT, and a fan of Chris's research and writing. I completely agree with Albert: Let's not get so focused on which % is the right one that we forget about the big picture in terms of the economy and society.

It seems to me that we can be sure of the following things: (1) Amazon and other Internet retailers stock a whole lot more products than what you can find in brick-and-mortar stores, (2) sales of these products are high in online markets, (3) the impact of this increased product variety on both consumers and producers is substantial.

So whether it's x% or y%, we are still talking about an important phenomenon that is changing how products are produced, marketed, and consumed. That's the real story here.

Posted by: Michael D. Smith | July 31, 2006 at 07:29 PM

Amusingly, I read and enjoyed the Cluetrain theory of publicity, and have seen it applied successfully and unsuccessfully (hint: business lunches and corporate-sponsored websites shouldn't be a place for midlife crises to be explored - but some of the people you talk to might be sympathetic).

Also the Contented Cows theory of management.

Now comes the Long Tail theory of marketing. Variety over impact, so long as that variety matches someone's need. Programmers successfully do Open Source this way: they have a need, and figure someone else will have the same need; if they tell the right people about it and let everyone work on the code, hopefully the solution to this need gains momentum and eventually reaches something like perfection. Plus, a lot of people have their needs met. Of course, the project could die an obscure death before even getting started due to mistakes like not telling the right people, or reinventing the square wheel.

But with so many different projects available, so many choices, there's bound to be something desireable in there. Look at SourceForge, after all. There are reasons why it's so large, but its very size is one of the big reasons why it's so popular.

Posted by: Zach C. | August 01, 2006 at 01:24 AM

That is a very good post Zach C. I know it is probably much easier to discuss Amazon store, than terrorism, in a blog. But what your point implies directly - is that because so many sinister 'projects' might undergo the chop, call it a form of Darwinism, that what plans are eventually hatched - will almost definitely succeed, just as bug free as good open source software tends to be. Now, compare that for a minute with our law enforcement and government protection organisations, which probably offer a more 'top-down' form of organisation, and you can bet your bottom dollar, that most

'suggestions' about counter-crime, counter anything, come mainly from the fat end of the curve, not the long end.

Brian O'Hanlon.

Posted by: _oh | August 01, 2006 at 01:54 PM

To give another quick example. John Thackara, in his book, In the Bubble speaks of the state run health care system being geared mainly for acute illness. That is, illness that is very serious, but plays itself out very quickly. But the majority of funds spent in the health care system, go not to 'acute', but rather, 'cronic' illnesses. That is, illnesses that go on for a long, long time. There is an imbalance here in the system. Mainly brought about, by special interest groups, who want to sell the expensive, high-profit hardware used to treat acute stuff, rather than deal with cronic more long term.

To bring that point, into my point about criminality prevention. As criminals use technology to race down the long tail, producing 'less-typical' kinds of crime, and more 'tailor-made' crimes. Should the crime prevention forces stick to tried and tested, or race down the long tail, after this new adversary?

Brian O' Hanlon.

Posted by: _oh | August 01, 2006 at 02:01 PM

To address one of the comments that blogging will eventually replace the newspaper: Huh??? Blogging is catching on and growing exponentially, yes, but it will never replace a newspaper. Blogging means searching the internet. It means time. It means getting the information you need from different sources. Newspaper means holding a large variety of information in your hand, in one place. The most you'll have to do is flipping the pages.

Posted by: GrowthIsOptional | August 10, 2006 at 06:20 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

Tidbits Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:46:19 Economics paper on Free online markets

“Priced and Unpriced Online Markets” by Harvard Business School professor Benjamin Edelman. Discusses tradeoffs in market such as email, IP addresses, search and dial-up Internet. “Reminiscent of the old adage about losing money on every unit but making it up in volume, online markets challenge norms about who should pay, when, and why.” I found this typically academic: dated, dry and pretty unilluminating. But it got published in The Journal of Economic Perspectives.

Mon, 31 Aug 2009 01:53:50 Find free stuff on Twitter

From Mashable: “Freezly is a lot like Tweetmeme in that it finds link and tweets and shows you their popularity based on retweets. Freezly though only picks up free giveaways and items with its algorithm. You can see the hottest free deals being shared on Twitter, the most recent deals Freezly has found, and an archive of past giveaways.”

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 02:08:25 Free drives paid in iPhone apps

From Cellular News. “Android and iPhone users download approximately 10 new apps per month, reports a survey by mobile advertisign agency, AdMob…..Of users who have bought paid applications, the top reason cited for their purchase decision was that they liked the free version of the app, demonstrating that free-to-paid conversions are a key factor in the paid app market.” (via Ken Rutkowski)

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:54:23 Is Free killing the porn industry?

From the LA Times: “Industry insiders estimate that since 2007, revenue for most adult production and distribution companies has declined 30% to 50% and the number of new films made has fallen sharply. "It’s the free stuff that’s killing us, and that’s not going away,” said Dion Jurasso, owner of porn production company Combat Zone, which has seen its business fall about 50% in the last three years. Porn is hardly the only segment of the media industry struggling with these issues. But its problems appear to be more severe. Whereas online piracy has forced big changes in the music industry and is starting to affect movies and television, it has upended adult entertainment. At least five of the 100 top websites in the U.S. are portals for free pornography, referred to in the industry as “tube sites,” according to Internet traffic ranking service Alexa .com. Some of their content is amateur work uploaded by users and some is acquired from cheap back catalogs, but much of it is pirated.“

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 11:07:00 "The latest craze: free ebooks"

From the AP: “In recent days, the top three Kindle sellers have been free books: Patterson’s, Joseph Finder’s "Paranoia” and Keyes’ “The Briar King.”“There’s always going to be someone who wants free things. What we’re trying to do is link free with paid,” Maja Thomas, senior vice president of digital media at Patterson’s publisher, the Hachette Book Group, said. “It’s like priming the pump.”

“What we like to do is make the first book in a series free, usually a series that has multiple books,” said Scott Shannon, publisher of the Del Rey/Spectra imprint at Random House, Inc., which published Keyes’ fantasy novel.

Shannon said Del Rey has had especially good luck with Naomi Novik’s “Temeraire” fantasy series after offering the first book for free. He said sales for the other Temeraire novels increased by more than 1,000 percent. “It’s been stunning,” he said.“

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 01:09:38 Criminalizing Free (French edition)

A few weeks ago, I speculated in a CNN editorial that antitrust authorities could make it illegal for dominant companies (read: Google) on the web to use Free, because it’s effectively offering a product below cost and subsidized by monopoly rent from another product. If that felt a bit far-fetched, consider this: Google is being sued in France for making Google Maps free. A French company wants to charge for a similar product.

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 20:37:31 Ex-NYT exec: Newpapers' "mass delusion" about paid content

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 let’s do it now. In other words, they think that wanting it so badly will automatically actually change the behavior of the audience. The world doesn’t work that way. Frankly, if all the news organizations locked pinkies, and said we’re all going to put up a big fat pay wall, you know what, more traffic for us. News is a commodity; I’m sorry to say.” (from Gawker)

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 03:26:19 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 — because that way it becomes maximally influential. (That’s my argument, anyway, we’ll see how much traction it gets.) In that sense, commentary is the opposite of news.”

Wed, 15 Jul 2009 02:42:05 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.

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:57:00 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”, which has collected a lot of great articles and opinion.

Mon, 13 Jul 2009 00:34:18 Interesting responses to my CNN op-ed on Google, Free and Antitrust

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 has a dominant product, it may run afoul of antitrust laws if it "ties” that product to another – for instance, by requiring customers who buy that product to buy another product as well. When a company provides products for free on a stand-alone basis, however, it’s not requiring anyone to buy anything. It may take business away from other companies trying to charge users for similar products, but that’s hardly an antitrust issue.“ eWeek’s Google Watch has a good roundup of the arguments on both sides.

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 22:11:11 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 blockheads, whether they’re rate-busting amateurs or professionals trawling for speaking gigs. All this free stuff raises the real standard of living, by making it ever easier for people to find entertainment, information and communication that pleases them.vBusiness strategy, however, seeks not only to create but to capture value. Free is about a phenomenon in which almost all the new value goes to consumers, not producers. It is false to assume that no price means no value. But it is equally false to argue that value implies profitability. ”

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:38:56 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 Skype and others use today will be increasingly important. It may allow businesses to preserve most of free’s scale benefits and advertising dollars while also building additional revenue streams.“

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 21:52:00 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.

Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:58:48 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)

Mon, 29 Jun 2009 09:42:00 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.”“

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 19:25:45 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.””

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 19:09:13 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.””

Sun, 28 Jun 2009 00:25:04 "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.

Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:30:19 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.”

Notes and sources for the book

FREE was available in all digital forms--ebook, web book, and audiobook--for free shortly after the hardcover was published on July 7th. The ebook and web book were free for a limited time and limited to certain geographic regions as determined by each national publisher; the unabridged MP3 audiobook (get zip file here) will remain free forever, available in all regions.

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