free
On Wednesday Terry Gross talked with Chris Anderson on Fresh Air about his new book, Free. His book presents the theory that businesses online can make money by making all of their services free. It also presents a history of the internet economy, showing how places like the Wall Street Journal online makes money by offering 80% of its material free, while over one million subscribers pay for the rest of the 20%.
I called Steve so that he’d turn on the radio. He makes his money through online advertising, though some sites make more money than others. His site that gets the most visitors, some 8,000 visitors per day, doesn’t make very much money. Some sites that take the majority of his time also don’t make the most money. Online doesn’t work that way, apparently.
Since the Ann Arbor News closed its doors, we talk a lot about ways that businesses can support themselves online. I personally don’t like that the New York Times is free online. That site is my homepage, I spend a long time there each day, and I want to pay them money. It’s scary to me that they are millions of dollars in debt now, and that good reporters all over the world are being let go because of the free online business model.
But Chris Anderson makes it sound so easy.
I think about it with my own work. If I could make a very long string of text and photography and drawings, good writing and heart and as much thoughtfulness as I can muster each day and offer it up online, which I try to do, and if I could do this and earn something — anything — that would go a long way. But I haven’t managed to figure out how to do that. The subscription system is silly for blogs. And some artists sell their work online through their site, but I can’t find it in my honor system to turn drawings into cards or t-shirts, and I’d rather prepare my drawings for a show in a gallery than give them up one by one online. I think there is a way, somehow, but I must be figuring it out very slowly.
Then Malcolm Gladwell reviewed Chris Anderson’s book in the most recent New Yorker.
Malcolm Gladwell is the king of pat theories. His books make the world seem so sparkly clean! But he argues that Chris Anderson’s Free is way too simple and, though he makes everything sound fluid, Anderson misses a bunch of nuances.
I love that conversations can happen that quickly. On NPR, of which I am a paying member, I hear a conversation with a writer that sparks all sorts of questions in our household. Then that day I get the New Yorker in the mail, which we pay for, and I see an argument against the simplicity of the book in question, all before I’ve ever been to a bookstore. (Nevermind that I link to the free versions of those two resources online.)
I want Steve to save the New York Times.
I don’t know how to do it, I’m not a good business person. This autumn I had a great idea for a book that I was sure would sell a million copies, but when I started writing it, it turned into a series of poems and drawings. That’s my business model.
