Free and the Value of Things

Seth’s Blog: Gripped in a free frenzy (or focused on scarcity and value).

This post begins with a link to a short piece on Seth Godin’s blog. I’ve been reading him for years now – online and the books he produces. In this post he is talking about the problem with free. Now, this is someone who has committed to free over the years. His early books were available free online (some still are) and he partnered up with Amazon a couple of years ago to experiment with a new approach to Kindle publishing with free books by a number of writers. However, with this latter experiment he did also make premium copies available.

The challenges he is working with in this latest post are those of the free-surfer and of limited attention.

Putting things up online for free is all well and good – but if all it does is attract the free-surfers who are only looking for things that they never intend to pay for, what have we achieved? At best perhaps just a few minutes of attention. Also, what value is placed on things that we get for free. I’m sure anyone with a Kindle has a pile of free downloads – that they never get round to reading – whereas the book that we paid for on download we are likely to read. The energy exchange created by buying something increases the chance that we will give it our attention.

The other big issue about attention is that with so much “stuff” available for free online, there hasn’t been an increase in the amount of time that we have available to give. This throws up some interesting challenges about the balance between attention and the value we place on things.

Perhaps we need to be thinking about the line of conversion from free to paying. I signed up for Bandcamp a couple of weeks ago and they point out that when artists put things up online with a suggested price, at least 40% of those downloading pay more than the amount. That’s an interesting reaction – is it because in that situation the person downloading is already a fan, or is it because they can sample before they buy?

One thing is for sure, all the old business models are broken. It’s important to experiment with free and paid for models – but it’s also important to find ways to ensure that the recipient makes some commitment too.