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Free: The Future Of A Radical Price explains how offering things for free has moved from marketing gimmick to truly sustainable business strategy, thanks to the power of the internet, and how free and freemium models are already changing how we sell stuff.
Free: The Future Of A Radical Price explains how offering things for free has moved from marketing gimmick to truly sustainable business strategy, thanks to the power of the internet, and how free and freemium models are already changing how we sell stuff.
Have you ever heard the saying “there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch?” It means that if something is free, you should be suspicious, as there’s usually a catch to it.
But why lunch? Well, the original phrase dates back all the way to the 19th century, specifically, the wild west. Back then, saloons made most their money in the evenings, when the cowboys arrived in town and everyone was done with work. In order to sell more drinks during the day, they started offering free lunch (sometimes completely free, sometimes if you bought just one drink).
Of course this had a catch: the food was very salty, so you’d get thirsty and have a couple of beers – which you’d pay for. And that’s how “free” was used for the remainder of the 19th and most of the 20th century: as a way of substituting the purchase of one good with another by giving you one thing for free, which would force you to pay for its “second half.”
Get a free recipe book, oh, you have to buy some dough to actually bake the desserts. Have a free razor? Oh, now you need to buy blades. Here’s a free phone, but you’ll have to pay every month to use it. And free magazines? Well, they always have ads in them.
Until the internet came around, we always paid for free stuff – in one way or another.
Introducing: the gift economy. In today’s online world, things can truly be free. With digital goods, you can have lots of content that really is 100% free. You can read it, watch it, listen to it and consume it any way you like, without having to buy anything else to make it work or to ever spend a time. Just look at Four Minute Books. All of my summaries are free. The newsletter is free. Time 2 Read is free. In this new gift economy, the definition of value has changed. Offline, value is measured in how much we pay, but online, what’s scarce isn’t money – it’s attention. If you publish a blog post that no one reads, the value of that post to the world is zero. So online, if you can get people to sacrifice the most valuable thing they have – their time – that’s how you know you’re creating something valuable. This value is measured in countless ways: likes, shares, followers,…
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Get the complete summary in the appFree used to be a way of just shifting the price of a good to something else.
We now live in a gift economy, in which attention is how we measure the value of things.
Create something and give it away for free, then find out what your fans want and charge for that.
"Free: The Future Of A Radical Price" is a strong fit if you want practical ideas around business, creativity, entrepreneurship—especially themes like free used to be a way of just shifting the price of a good to something else; we now live in a gift economy, in which attention is how we measure the value of things. The MinuteRead summary distills these concepts into a focused read, whether you're deciding whether to buy the book or applying its lessons at work.
Motivated to help readers with free: The Future Of A Radical Price explains how offering things for free has moved from marketing gimmick to, Chris Anderson wrote “Free: The Future Of A Radical Price” to package those ideas for a fast, focused read. In “Free: The Future Of A Radical Price”, Chris Anderson focuses on free: The Future Of A Radical Price explains how offering things for free has moved from marketing gimmick to. Through “Free: The Future Of A Radical Price”, Chris Anderson distills …
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