I get asked this all the time these days, so before I crash after a speaking tour of Latin America (eight cities in four days!), here are my thoughts on what a recession will mean for free-based busin...
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What should you do amidst financial turmoil?"Put wax in your ears. People are more afraid of flying than driving because the press does not report car accidents. I never watch the news. Only listen to...
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Sent to get a gallon of milk at Safeway, I decided to take a picture of every example of "free" that I encountered as I walked through the aisles and into the parking lot. There were lots of repetitio...
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From the Forbes 400 list, the following are the billionaires who made their money on businesses whose products are primarily free to consumers(I didn't include diversified media tycoons, such as Ruper...
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When you're writing a book you need to have your elevator pitch down or "What's the book about?" will become the most dreaded four words you can hear (followed closely by "how's it going?").Obviously ...
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When I posted on my taxonomy of free, I asked for help in designing it better. David Armano, VP of Experience Design with Critical Mass, responded with the below, which is a clear improvement over my ...
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Thanks for the feedback on the redesign. We've now fixed the two main problems--lack of white space on the left on small screens or non-maximized browsers, and no search function. We've now got five p...
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Over the past five years, I've launched project after project. I love each one and put equal effort into each. And each is successful in its own way. But I can't help but notice that my interests are ...
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A few weeks ago, I posted a diagram grouping free business models into three categories: cross-subsidies (eg, razor-and-blades), three-party markets (ads) and "freemium" (what economists call "version...
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The Long Tail's subtitle was "Why selling less of more is the future of business". Shamelessly, the subtitle of my Wired FREE article was "Why $0.00 is the future of business". But now comes my collea...
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As a magazine editor, I understand how hard it is to turn amorphous subjects into punchy covers. But can anyone explain the cover of the August 11th issue of Newsweek International? (I have a piece in...
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My book is mostly about two prices--something and nothing--but at dinner in NYC with Jay Walker this week, he convinced me to include a discussion of a third price: less than nothing. That's right, a ...
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After four years of a Typepad template I threw together one Sunday night and never revisited, this blog has a redesign, thanks to the team at wired.com.Aesthetically, you'll notice that it's part of t...
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I try not to write much about my day job here, but in the context of my last post about the virtues of passionate amateurs, I have to brag about the team at our Wired parenting blog, GeekDad. They are...
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In the endless debate about the relative merits of amateurs vs. professionals in a world the two have equal access to the tools of production, I think people miss a key point:Amateurs self-select for ...
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From a terrific New York Magazine feature on the future of the book industry, this tidbit from Barnes & Noble CEO Steve Riggio: “We buy every title published—our business is a long-tail business—less ...
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What is it about Harvard Business School professors and their embrace of the grindingly conventional pitched as fresh contrarianism? The latest is HBS marketing professor John Quelch, who bravely argu...
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On of my chapters begins with the story of Lewis Strauss, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission, who in 1954 famously said "It is not too much to expect that our children will enjoy in their homes ...
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If the Nokia phone with a year's worth of free music that we wrote about the other day sounded too good to be true, it's because it was. According to Engadget, pre-order pricing at UK retailers sugges...
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I've always assumed that Google was the best--and biggest--example in history of a business model based on free, but until today I hadn't actually run the numbers. Before I get to those, let's definit...
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