Quickthink

Tim Sanders clued me into a “web based guru brawl” that is in full swing. . Here is a link to Tim’s post.

On the one side are Chris Anderson (Mr. Long Tail) and Seth Godin (he of Tribes). On the other side, young Malcolm Gladwell (Mr. Tipping Point, Outliers, Blink and so on). It is a dream match-up.

Anderson landed the first punch with a new book called “Free” where he argues that as costs of content generation hover near zero, people will demand more and more free content. Pay for content business models will wither. Errr ….. of course, after you pay $17.81  for Anderson’s book. BTW, this is not really a novel argument — social networking gurus have been making this point this for years.

But young Malcolm Gladwell is not … errr ….. buying it. He counter punched in a book review in the New Yorker, questioning whether costs really are falling to zero. After all, a lot of people pay for his books and articles. And WSJ charges a subscription. Ergo, we just don’t know.

Then Seth Godin jumped into the ring with a “Malcolm is Wrong” post on his blog. Seth’s one two punch went like this - ok, people will pay for some things — but not for the garbage they have been paying for so far. There is after all …. errr …. so much other garbage floating around to distract us.

Nothing like a good brawl to get the blood flowing. But I wonder when will people start writing about what kind of content people want/need/demand in this “new” era, rather than how much they will be willing to pay?

FOLLOW - Oops! Tom Peters blog also links us to the “brawl” — but I see from Tom’s post that I left out Anderson’s reply to Gladwell. In the reply, Chris explains how Wired Magazine is making a lot of money on a free blog for “geek dads”. As Marc Andreessen might say — Obviously, it was scalable.

2d FOLLOW - For those who want to think more deeply about “freeconomics” business modeling, Fred Wilson offers a rather lengthy post on how it actually works. He should know. He pays people to do it.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 4th, 2009 at 10:27 am and is filed under Business models, Tech. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.