One of my favorite articles of the last year came from Wired Magazine’s March 2008 issue, “Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business” This put a very interesting spin on product development for me and got me thinking about Project X I have been talking about. Often the biggest issue that publishers have is on pricing of a product. When I started in the PDF business the per page average cost was 10 cents per page for a PDF, now it is roughly 18 to 25 cent per page. The more we change the money we will make as long as customers can afford it. The question that love to think about answers for, is imagine if t you were a company and you had to make products for free, how would you generate money to pay the people who did the work? On the web, this directly relates to the topic of drawing traffic to your site and then selling ad space on your site. The book, How to Make Webcomics covered that topic very well. So well that I now use Project Wonderful to place ads on my website to generate money for something that I already do and have done for free. I call that a win-win.
So the question I have for you to think about is, how can you give something away for free and then make money on it? The person who figures this one out will take over what every market they are in. Don’t believe me, ask Google about it. Talk to you later…
Just FYI, the Free Content Model is something that Phil and I (among others) were discussing with STAN! on his LJ late last month. You might be interested in the discussion:
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