(From the artistic interpretation of Chris Anderson’s talk with Guy Kawasaki.)
Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail (and a recent article about giving things away for free) talks to some Linux people and tech bloggers about open source, free software and free things in general. (The official title is Rebuilding the World with Free Everything.)
It’s a topic of particular interest to me right now because I’ve been working on an article about Brett Gaylor, a filmmaker whose documentary is all about copyleft, open source and intellectual property.
They’re having a sort of rambling conversation that keeps dipping into the problems facing content media. Anderson says the reason the publishing industry is struggling is not because people don’t want the product, but because online revenues are about one-fifth what they used to be pre-internet. Same with newspapers, TV, radio. He says their production costs are about 50 percent of total, and the other half is distribution.
Anderson pimps the “Premium” model — all content media should consider it. Can be lucrative once you’ve segmented audience and focused on what the 10 percent of your audience who is very engaged wants. Requires a strong, devoted community, which should be your goal anyway.
They dump on “tip jars”: The patronage model hasn’t worked very well, says Dave Taylor, because most people won’t bother if they have the option to not pay. Fairly obvious, wouldn’t you think? Sure, except many newspapers continue to propose pay sites as their potential saviour.
Then again, notes Doc Searls, we’re figuring a lot of these models out. We don’t know exactly how the media evolution is going to look. We can only guess.
Taylor says attempts to monetize everything are a mistake: Not everything has to be a profit centre in your business.
A guy in the audience asks whether making things free is going to cause a lot of people to lose their jobs. People like who?, Anderson asks. “Printers, for one,” the guy says.
“Screw printers!” Anderson cries like a crazy man. Awesome. “We have re-democratized the tools of production. By distributing the access to factory to everybody, we have the capacity to work in any domain in any place in any time.”
Everyone who has laptops open in the room is working — or could be if they weren’t Twittering incessantly, Anderson says. This is the new reality.
This blog post is brought to you by that new reality.
