Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

February 28, 2008 at 12:05 am PT

A decade and a half into the great online experiment, the last debates over free-versus-pay online are ending. In 2007 the New York Times went free; this year, so will much of The Wall Street Journal. Once a marketing gimmick, free has emerged as a full-fledged economy. … The rise of “freeconomics” is being driven by the underlying technologies that power the Web. Just as Moore’s law dictates that a unit of processing power halves in price every 18 months, the price of bandwidth and storage is dropping even faster. Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.

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Tagged with: bandwidth, Chris Anderson, free, freeconomics, storage, Web, Wired

comments so far. Add yours.

  • http://allthingsd.com/ Michael Long

    “Which is to say, the trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero.”

    Bah. I’m pretty sure my hosting company isn’t going to start charging me nothing for power, or rack space, or bandwidth, or servers, or storage, or backups, or software, or support, or maintenance.

    Or, for that matter, that my employees are going to start working for me for free.

    The costs of all of those things may be declining TOWARDS zero, but the “cost of doing business online” will never BE zero.

    In fact, become popular on the web, and while per-gigabyte costs may drop, that’s more than offset by the fact you need a lot more of them. And watching hosting power bill, I’m pretty sure those costs aren’t going down, but up, way, way up, more than compensating for any supposed reduction in bandwidth charges.

  • http://domino.research.ibm.com/comm/research_projects.nsf/pages/bluegene.index.html rod sandcones

    You can reduce your bandwidth and hosting costs to zero and maybe even turn a profit by hosting advertising or something similar. Some deals have proven to be very lucrative for some. It’s a valid business model. Information wants to be free. Resistance is futile. :)

  • http://allthingsd.com/ Michael Long

    “You can reduce your bandwidth and hosting costs to zero…”

    Failed high school economics, did we? The fact that I may or may not be able to generate the income needed to pay for those services doesn’t mean they’re “free”.

    “… maybe even turn a profit by hosting advertising or something similar.”

    Right. Tell that to all of the people who surf with AdBlocker or FlashBlock extensions added to FireFox. People don’t want ads either.

    “Information wants to be free.”

    Next time post your SSN. It too wants to be free.

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