Free: The Future of a Radical Price

The New York Times bestselling author heralds the future of business in Free.

In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Far more than a promotional gimmick, Free is a business strategy that may well be essential to a company's survival.

The costs associated with the growing online economy are trending toward zero at an incredible rate. Never in the course of human history have the primary inputs to an industrial economy fallen in price so fast and for so long. Just think that in 1961, a single transistor cost $10; now Intel's latest chip has two billion transistors and sells for $300 (or 0.000015 cents per transistor--effectively too cheap to price). The traditional economics of scarcity just don't apply to bandwidth, processing power, and hard-drive storage.

Yet this is just one engine behind the new Free, a reality that goes beyond a marketing gimmick or a cross-subsidy. Anderson also points to the growth of the reputation economy; explains different models for unleashing the power of Free; and shows how to compete when your competitors are giving away what you're trying to sell.

In Free, Chris Anderson explores this radical idea for the new global economy and demonstrates how this revolutionary price can be harnessed for the benefit of consumers and businesses alike.

The editor-in-chief of Wired magazine reveals how to run an online business profitably in spite of the Internet's inherently free culture, disseminating the principles of a "priceless economy" in six categories that pertain to advertising, labor exchange, and advanced-version fees. By the author of the best-selling The Long Tail. 150,000 first printing.

1. The birth of free — 2. Free 101 : a short course on a most misunderstood word — 3. The history of free : zero, lunch, and the enemies of capitalism — 4. The psychology of free : it feels good : too good? — 5. Too cheap to matter : the web's lesson : when something halves in price each year, zero is inevitable — 6. "Information wants to be free" : the history of a phrase that defined the digital age — 7. Competing with free : Microsoft learned how to do it over decades, but Yahoo had just months — 8. De-monitization : Google and the birth of a twenty-first-century economic model — 9. The new media models : free media is nothing new : what is new is the expansion of that model to everything else online — 10. How big is the free economy? : there's more to it than just dollars and cents — 11. Econ 000 : how a century-old joke became the law of digital economics — 12. Non-monetary economies : where money doesn't rule, what does? — 13. Waste is (sometimes) good : the best way to exploit abundance is to relinquish control — 14. Free world : China and Brazil are the frontiers of free : what can we learn from them? — 15. Imagining abundance : thought experiments in "post-scarcity" societies, from science fiction to religion — 16. "You get what you pay for" and other doubts about free — Coda. Free in a time of economic crisis — Free rules : the ten principles of abundance thinking — Freemium tactics — Fifty business models built on free.