Chris Anderson’s new book, ‘Free: The Future of Radical Price’ has received much criticism, especially from Macolm Gladwell, who clearly doesn’t like the world (depicted by Anderson) in which highly paid professional journalists (I can’t imagine who he is thinking of) are replaced by amateur volunteers. It hasn’t helped Anderson’s cause that he has also been accused of lifting large sections of the book from Wikipedia, which prompts the question about when does crowdsourcing become plagiarism?
Personally I think that Anderson exagerates for effect. He is simply highlighting how consumer empowerment poses a fundamental challenge to the economic model on which the media and entertainment industry is based. He is not necessarily arguing that giving away products and services for free is a good thing, but simply that getting people to pay for much of the media and entertainment they consume is becoming increasingly difficult. Writing in The Times, Antonia Senior, argues that Gladwell’s mistake is to assume “that Anderson is the evangelist of free, not its chronicler”.
Despite the criticism, Free makes a useful contribution to the debate about the implications of consumer empowerment. It provides plenty of interesting examples of how different businesses are responding to the challenge posed by consumers’ unwillingness to pay for content, from the ‘freeconomy’ approach of Google (funding a free service through ad revenues) to the ‘freemium’ model adopted by businesses such as Skype, which offers free and (paid-for) premium version of its services. Unfortunately, for every Google, there are thousands of businesses – especially media companies – who have struggled to make either of these models work. It is not Anderson’s fault that he happens to be the bearer of bad news.