F'ck Free. Charge a fee!

Chris Anderson wrote a highly quoted book called "Free: The future of radical price", which can be purchased for $27 on Amazon ($10 for download). There has been a lot of talk that suggest all media content will converge to lovely point of free. The rationale is that with unlimited supply of media, the market will become perfectly competitive and products will be sold at cost... since "cost" is basically zero with todays technology, the price of media should therefore be free.

I think this is all bull crap.

If I had a dollar for every entrepreneur who had this "great idea" that involves an algorithm and some sort of secret "black bock" technology and use "viral marketing" to generate millions of hits each day and sell ads... I would be Google. Meanwhile, they will continue to starve. This is the world of "Free" my friends.

Sure, consumers don't want to pay for content that they can easily get for free. But, scarcity is the true source of value and happiness... not gluttony. Media companies need to figure out how to create a product that consumers actually care about and are willing to pay for.

How much did you pay to watch Avatar? You could have pulled it off a torrent for free, but you didn't... why not? Why do you pay 10 cents for a song on lala? It's all about convenience and quality of product.

The fact is Chris, Free is not sustainable. Those who pursue a free-strategy will soon go out of business. It's basic economics that have existed for thousands of years.

If you want to win in this game... just produce a product that is so good that customers are actually willing to pay you for it! If they won't, I'm sorry, but your product is just not needed or wanted anyway.