Aug 18th, 2009
If You Know You Could Get Something Free, Would You Still Pay For it?
This appears to be one of the big questions of the Internet as it stands.
So many great Internet services are free (although, as we see with things like Sandy and now tr.im (well, maybe), there are times companies cannot keep free going) that there’s some belief that if a service charges any amount it’s too much. That leaves services that are free (for instance, blogs like this one) that are meant to earn money in search of a revenue model.
More and more free services need to find revenue models. Advertising (the Google Adsense ads that have become so prevalent around the ‘Net) is one way; affiliate programs are another. But there are cases–more than one of them–where people will pay for content they could otherwise get for free.
For instance, Jonathan Coulton’s music is available freely on his Web site, yet many are more than willing to pay for it. I recently bought DVDs of BBS: the Documentary even though I can watch it without charge under its Creative Commons license. And Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is an example of a different type of video endeavor that was available for free and is now sold on DVD.
Part of the issue here is what people are willing to pay for. Lots of folks will only pay for stuff they can’t get for free; on the other hand, there are folks who will take what they can for free but will pay what they consider reasonable for something–for instance, they may not be willing to pay $15 for a CD but they will pay $.99 for the song on the CD they want. And there’s also folks who get free content–like music from the public library or recorded off the radio–who wouldn’t otherwise fork money over.
Would you pay for something you otherwise get free?
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