Chris Anderson on "Free": Crap is in the eye of the beholder, scarcity and abundance side by side

Chris Anderson published an interesting excerpt from his upcoming new book "Free" in the recent edition of Wired Magazine. If you are in the Content / Media Business, this is indeed a must-read (the book, as well as this excerpt). Here are the nuggets I found (quoted from Chris / Wired) - I couldn't have said it better myself! The [links] are added by me, though.

• "The most important thing is relevance. We'll always choose a "low-quality" video of something we actually want over a "high-quality" video of something we don't" [comment: watch this video where I speak about Context and Content = Kings]

• "What this boils down to is the difference between abundance- and scarcity-based business models. If you're controlling a scarce resource, like the prime-time broadcast schedule, you have to be discriminating. There are real costs associated with those half-hour chunks of network time, and the penalty for failing to reach tens of millions of viewers with them is calculated in red ink and lost careers... But if you're tapping into an abundant resource, you can afford to take chances, since the cost of failure is so low. Nobody gets fired when your YouTube video is viewed only by your mom"

• "Sound schizophrenic? That's the nature of the hybrid world we're entering, where scarcity and abundance exist side by side. We're good at scarcity thinking—it's the 20th-century organizational model. Now we have to get good at abundance thinking, too" [comment: yes, indeed, there's no cookbook, yet!]

Related articles by Zemanta

• Free, Freemium and Feels Like Free: Audiences and Artists in a connected world (part 6) (blip.tv)
• Announcing virtual presentations and speeches (mediafuturist.com)

Comments

[Varun]

Yeah, well, trying going to potential investors saying, hey, abundance thinking requires that we figure out a profit plan as we go along... ;-) While the overall point is well taken, this part is a "bit" tricky in this economy...

- Varun Arora
Founder, HomeCamera.com

[David W. King]

Why does this latest business model remind me of the business models used before the internet bubble meltdown a decade ago? Or predictions that the Dow would someday hit 30,000 points? Or more recently the thinking that lead to the downturn of the economy and the foreclosures of homes everywhere and the bankruptcy of the American auto market?

While Chris Anderson's background (Wired) gives him credibility, the brains behind these ideas were no less credible.

While it's fun to entertain new ideas, these ideas are largely unproven. Could he be leading us down a primrose lane to sell a book and this new business model? Could Trent Reznor afford to promote his ideas had he not already made the money he did while he enjoyed the big corporate push he received playing with Nine Inch Nails.

[Gerd Leonhard]

David, imho there is no such thing as a proven idea. We are even struggling to define a Proven Reality. Chris is summarizing a very important trend, and one that we need to live with: free stuff is key to the future of content. And Chris walks the talk with his book, too - you can get free audio, iphone and pdfs of it.