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What is Free? Seth on Anderson V Gladwell.

By shehab ⋅ July 4, 2009 ⋅ Email This ⋅ Print ⋅ Post a comment
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WIRED free


There’s a fun and unnecessary blogosphere fight breaking out between two interchangeable popular cultural commentators- The New Yorker‘s Malcom Gladwell and WIRED‘s Chris Anderson – around Anderson’s latest book Free: The Future of a Radical Price and Gladwell’s disparaging review of it and Anderson’s rebuttal.

The funny thing is these guys are mirror images of each other. Anderson overstates his case (a classic Gladwell trait) and Gladwell misconstrues the premise (as Anderson is prone to do), both call-and-response capture the zeitgeist (another shared habit) and throughout they overgeneralize based on limited anecdotal examples.

freeSeth Godin comes out on Anderson’s side (as would I if I was taking sides), and ends his post with this gem which summarizes why it’s such an exciting time to be thinking about / participating in media right now:

    Neatness is for historians. For a long time, all the markets for attention-based goods are going to be messy, which means that there are going to be huge opportunities for people (like you?) able to get that most precisous asset (our attention) for free. At least for a while.
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Discussion

View Comments for “What is Free? Seth on Anderson V Gladwell.”

  • str82ais
    I'm with Gladwell's rebuttal on this. I don't see the free thing working long-term. All the signs are we're in some sort of transition period.
  • i think both gladwell and anderson are wrong. or at least neither is completely right.

    fred wilson and albert wenger offer much more cogent, thoughtful takes on the argument.

    the 'free thing' isn't going away. there are certain characteristics about the digital space (ease of publishing / marginal costs approaching zero etc) that make it fundamentally different - i am referring to the media world in particular where the product has always been virtual but has historically been distributed in physical form.

    the online ad market is still in its infancy. i believe it still has plenty of growth potential. i also think it will evolve way beyond the basic text / banner formats. facebook is already providing a glimpse of what's to come (there will be plenty more trial and error before we figure out what works). sustainable business models will emerge here although many industries (music, news, magazines) will need new and most likely shrunken cost structures. many media companies will morph into tech companies (the nytimes is already there) or forge partnerships with tech cos.

    the combination of these trends will leave an altered environment. so yes we're in some sort of transition. but it's a transition to something quite different to what we started with.
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