It is with no small amount of trepidation that I type this. In no small part because I’m not entirely sure I follow the concept of Free just yet.
Free to me has always been a dangerous word. From the days of my childhood where the military dictatorship I lived in took over the bottling factories and began making and selling a soda, that tasted like cola. The name, of course, was Free Cola. Say that three times fast and the memory of a throat lozenge is sure to come up. The soda soon folded, as did the regime.
Anyway, I digress. Free. I was taught that nothing is for free. Everybody wants something for nothing, But in the internet, wanting something can set you back. Big time. I read cnnsi.com infinite more times than espn.com. Why? Because of ESPN Insider, which I’m not even sure it’s paid anymore but which still cuts articles in half with a statement “TO READ THE REST OF THIS YOU HAVE TO BE AN ESPN InSider.” Like I said. I’m not even sure if they charge anymore, but the mere fact that they still won’t give it up for free and still want something makes me switch to cnnsi.com as fast as I can possibly type.
The first time I heard about the giving something for nothing was in a book that has little to do with social media. It was Robert Pausch poignant memoire “The Last Lecture,” where he mentions the tale of the $100,000 salt shaker. When he was a kid, he bought at Disneyland a salt shaker for his parents. He was so excited to show it to his mom that he tripped and fell, breaking it into a thousand pieces. He told the Disney people the story, they replaced it for free that very day and since then, he figured he had spent about 100 grand at Disney. The similes here are a bit hard to find but they’re still there. I’m still a cnnsi.com consumer, years after the appearance on the scene of ESPN InSider. I subscribe to SI and not to ESPN (my subscription comes without the swimsuit issue, so that was not a factor in the decision) and my favorite writer in ESPN.com is Rick Reilly, whom I first became a fan of when he posted his column on, you guessed it, CNNSI.com
Today, it seems riskier than I can ever remember before, to ask something in return if you’re a web site. It seems that everything out there can be had for free. The U.S. soccer commentators made a big stink about how there was no way to watch U.S. versus Honduras within the continental U.S. because of a broadcasting-rights issue. At least three Web sites offered the game for the price of zero.
It seems, given the examples presented by Anderson, such as King Gillette, that everything is in reverse these days. When I was growing up, the trick to make something saleable, was to make it exclusive. If you advertised on TV, your product was not good enough and needed that extra push. A good product, the saying went, back in 1980s Chile, sells itself. Now the key, it seems is to make your product ubiquitous, accessible, and here’s the real kick in the pants, really good and really cheap at the same time.
Not that people aren’t still willing to pay. I forked over 30 bucks a month for about two years just so I could watch international soccer and I fell for the trap that was NYT Select when it first came into being back in the late 1990s. What’s weird is that I paid for NYT select merely out of a misplaced need for status. “I read the New York Times, lah-dih-da! When NYT finally put Select out of its misery, I kept on reading. Not out of status but because I liked it.
But llike I said before,t he real shocker of this new economy of free is that cheap and good aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive anymore. It used to be that you had to pick between something good, something cheap or something fast. Now the costs are such that you can have all three!
