Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business - 4 views
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zero-cost distribution has turned sharing into an industry
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Bri Zabriskie on 27 Sep 10This article is long but well worth skimming. I used a quote from it in one of my latest blogposts, "Free Entertainment?" at bricolorful.wordpress.com
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Invent something people use and throw away.
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By giving away the razors, which were useless by themselves, he was creating demand for disposable blades.
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The fastest-growing parts of the gaming industry are ad-supported casual games online and free-to-try massively multiplayer online games
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The first is the extension of King Gillette's cross-subsidy to more and more industries.
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The second trend is simply that anything that touches digital networks quickly feels the effect of falling costs.
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And that meant software of broader appeal, which brought in more users, who in turn found even more uses for computers.
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FREE CHANGES EVERYTHING
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The most common of the economies built around free is the three-party system. Here a third party pays to participate in a market created by a free exchange between the first two parties.
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There are dozens of ways that media companies make money around free content, from selling information about consumers to brand licensing, "value-added" subscriptions, and direct ecommerce
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Yahoo's pay-per-pageview banners, Google's pay-per-click text ads, Amazon's pay-per-transaction "affiliate ads," and site sponsorships were just the start.