Free is the New Business Model

Web 2.0 takes publishing out of the hands of a few and puts it in the hands of the many. Google is a free search engine; Wikipedia is a free encyclopedia; YouTube lets you be a movie producer; Blogger gives you your own newspaper column; iTunes gives you your own radio station; and Flickr lets you be a photographer. And all of these services are free. Is everything that's any good now free, and is everything that's free any good? More importantly, from a business perspective, will free destroy your business - or can you use it to boost your business?



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Benefits

• Free content gets them into your community
• "Free" is a magic word in marketing
• You must prove you're an expert before they visit your Web site
• Make money through your content, not from your content
• So much free stuff is available now anyway - if you can't beat them, join them
• People will come to your Web site now not because of your advertising, but your reputation
• New business models superseding the old (e.g. newspapers dying)
  

Examples

• The YouTube video of Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent went super-viral - almost certain to get her a recording contract;
• Gihan's new book Web Sites for Speakers, Trainers, Coaches and Consultants is free in e-book form;
• Gihan's new Q&A teleseminar sessions are open to everybody;
• BYU professor David Wiley predicts that universities will be irrelevant by 2020 as courseware will be free to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Universities will instead earn revenue by offering diplomas to enrolled students who've paid tuition fees.
  

References

• Free is the future of business - by Chris Anderson
• Make Money Around Free Content - Fred Wilson
• In favour of micropayments over free - Nick Cernis
• Beyond Free - Kevin Kelly
  

Conclusion

If you're a consumer:

• Look for stuff that's free - it's probably available
• Consider upgrading to the paid version - it might be worth it for what you get
• No "free lunch" - sometimes there are hidden costs, from the innocuous (provide personal details, leading to spam) to the costly (sign up now, pay later)
  

If you're a provider:

• Make more stuff free to build your reputation and get more traffic to your site
• Find out who's offering the free version of what you're charging for - it might shock you!
  
• Information is becoming a commodity, so figure out how to add services and experiences to commodities

Open Access

Although some government information is still clouded in secrecy, governments ARE increasingly using the Internet to give citizens more open access to some of their data.



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This is a follow-up to our podcast on the "Digital Economy", in which we discussed initiatives by the Australian and US governments to tap into the Internet to help develop their economies.

One aspect of this is providing open access to public sector information, i.e. providing free access to information collected by government agencies.

Examples

Some agencies have been doing this for ages - it's part of their
mission.

The Bureau of Meteorology provides weather forecasts and historical climate data. Chris has a widget in his tool-bar that displays Perth's current weather conditions, five day forecast and radar map retrieved from the BOM server.

Transperth (WA public transport utility) provides bus, Train & Ferry timetables, fairs, route planners on their web-site. Also integrated into Google maps.

Fuelwatch gives us petrol prices in WA.

More recently...

The Australian Bureau of Statistics adopted the Creative Commons 2.5 license for its data sets.

German Federal and State agencies donated 350,000 pictures to Wikipedia under the CC3.0 attribution+share-alike license.

MIT announced all faculty publications would be made open access (usually copyright is signed over to journal publishers).

Caveats

An important consideration in the publication of [government] data sets, is respect for privacy and security. An article in Computer World found on-line government records the richest source of personal information (social security number, address, occupation, image of signature etc.)

Often the government's heart isn't really in it - it's more about political window-dressing, e.g www.GroceryChoice.gov.au

Conclusion

If information is power then more power to governments who open access to their public sector information.