Radical Engine Redesign Would Reduce Pollution, Oil Consumption

FREE. The Future of a Radical Price

PROLOGUE

In November 2008, the surviving members of the original Monty Python team, stunned by the extent of digital piracy of their videos, issued a very stern announcement on YouTube:

For 3 years you YouTubers have been ripping us off, taking tens of thousands of our videos and putting them on YouTube. Now the tables are turned. It’s time for us to take matters into our own hands. We know who you are, we know where you live and we could come after you in ways too horrible to tell. But being the extraordinarily nice chaps we are, we’ve figured a better way to get our own back: We’ve launched our own Monty Python channel on YouTube. No more of those crap quality videos you’ve been posting. We’re giving you the real thing—high quality videos delivered straight from our vault. What’s more, we’re taking our most viewed clips and uploading brand new high quality versions. And what’s even more, we’re letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there! But we want something in return. None of your driveling, mindless comments. Instead, we want you to click on the links, buy our movies & TV shows and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years.

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CHRIS ANDERSON

Three months later, the results of this rash experiment with Free were in. Monty Python’s DVDs had climbed to No. 2 on Amazon’s Movies and TV best-sellers list, with increased sales of 23,000 percent. So there! Free worked, and worked brilliantly. More than 2 million people watched the clips on YouTube as word of mouth spread and parents introduced their children to the Black Knight and the Dead Parrot Sketch. Thousands of viewers were reminded how much they loved Monty Python and wanted more, so they ordered the DVDs. Response videos, mashups, and remixes spread, and a new generation learned the proper meaning of “Killer Rabbit.” And all this cost Monty Python essentially nothing, since YouTube paid all the bandwidth and storage costs, such as they were. What’s surprising about this example is how unsurprising it is. There are countless other cases just like this online, where pretty much everything is given away for free in some version with the hopes of selling something else—or, even more frequently, with no expectation of pay at all. I’m typing these words on a $250 “netbook” computer, which is the fastest growing new category of laptop. The operating system happens to be a version of free Linux, although it doesn’t matter since I don’t run any programs but the free Firefox Web browser. I’m not using Microsoft Word, but rather free Google Docs, which has the advantage of making my drafts available to me wherever I am, and I don’t have to worry about backing them up since Google takes care of that for me. Everything else I do on this computer is free, from my email to my Twitter feeds. Even the wireless access is free, thanks to the coffee shop I’m sitting in. And yet Google is one of the most profitable companies in America, the “Linux ecosystem” is a $30 billion industry, and the coffee shop seems to be selling $3 lattes as fast as they can make them. Therein lies the paradox of Free: People are making lots of money charging nothing. Not nothing for everything, but nothing for enough that we have essentially created an economy as big as a good-sized country around the price of $0.00. How did this happen and where is it going? That’s the central question of this book. For me, it started with a loose end in The Long Tail. My first book