The Value of Content and Ideas
An interesting NewYorker.com piece published July 6th by Malcolm Gladwell, titled ‘Priced To Sell’, looks at free and the value of content & ideas. It’s a useful read for the average small to medium sized business marketer.
In it Gladwell questions some of Chris Anderson’s [Wired Magazine and 'The Long Tail' fame] theories on free products and services.
Says Anderson, “…an ability to participate in Journalism extends beyond the credentialed halls of traditional media. Journalism as a profession will share the stage with journalism as an avocation.”
What Anderson is saying is digital storage, processing and bandwidth costs are so low that there’s no longer any barrier to entry for content creation. He also suggests that by sharing some things with a target market for FREE, actual paid business products or services can become viral! With the cost of distribution to targeted searchers, social networkers and RSS subscribers also being negligible in cost, *we’d argue* publishing or blogging to share useful advertorial information is actually less an avocation and more a business responsibility! Ultimately a business can create & distribute it’s advertorial messaging, without time or space limits, at a negligible cost. So, versus the cost of traditional advertising, a business is either sharing useful and timely product / service knowledge for consumers to find OR… missing the boat on how those same consumers are evaluating future purchases.
However, for a business, there are responsibilities to marketplaces. Time, effort and intellectual capital have cost. Entrusting them to free communication or advertising services, for instance, has downside. Gladwell doesn’t necessarily argue for or against these points so much as he questions them. Partly cautioning against free he says, “Free removes the necessity of aesthetic judgment.” Using Youtube as an example he asks, “So how does YouTube bring in revenue? Well, it tries to sell advertisements alongside its videos. The problem is that the videos attracted by psychological free—pirated material, cat videos, and other forms of user-generated content—are not the sort of thing that advertisers want to be associated with. Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube will lose close to half a billion dollars this year.” He goes on to use the power and drug industries as other examples to further his questions about anything free and whether or not it is truly sustainable.
Time will tell, but Gladwell certainly makes interesting arguments the serious business person should consider. By all means, give ‘Priced To Sell’ a quick read.
Related Posts:
- Disintermediation: reduce direct marketing while reducing overall advertising costs
- Can You Afford a Free Business Blog?
chris@kineticknowledge.com
What You Get With Kinetic Blogs!
Subscribe Here For Better Blogging Knowledge
Join Us on Facebook - Become a Fan!
« People Spend 67% More Time on Blogs in 2009, Nielsen | Home | 13 New Clients in June for Monmouth County NJ Chiropractor »
Comments are closed.