Chris Anderson's Blog, page 2

Dear Malcolm: Why so threatened?

It's now clear that the bane of my next year will be questions about the future of the newspaper industry from journalists. I don't blame them—newspapers are indeed one of the industries most affected by Free (although that's just one manifestation of their larger problem: having lost their monopoly on consumer attention). And neither I nor anybody else has any good answers, other than the newspaper business is probably going to shrink but not go away, and that the business model will have to c

Corrections in the digital editions of Free

As some of you may have seen, VQN rightly spotted that I failed to cite Wikipedia in some passages in Free. This is entirely my own screwup, and will be corrected in the ebook and digital forms before publication (and in the notes, which will be posted online at the same time the hardcover is released), but I did want to explain a bit more how it happened and what we’re doing about it.

First, as readers of my writings know, I’m a supporter of using Wikipedia as a source (not the only one, of c

Waste is Good. FREE excerpt in Wired

We published an excerpt from the book in Wired this month. Here’s how it starts:

“In 1969, the Neiman Marcus catalog offered the first home PC, a stylish stand-up model called the Honeywell Kitchen Computer, priced at $10,600. The picture shows an aproned housewife caressing the machine, with this tag line: "If she can only cook as well as Honeywell can compute." That image should be on every cubicle in Silicon Valley; it's a testament both to what technologists get right and what they get ba

My Free speech from last weeks Wired Business Conference

I cover competing with free, free gaming models, the newspaper free vs paid debated (actually free vs. freemium) and the antitrust implications of free

The slides are below, with apologies for the messed up typeface. It didn’t look that way on the day:

Other speeches from the conference are here

FREE publication is a month away! 150 books to give away now.

The hardcovers of FREE: The Future of a Radical Price just came in and they look great. Pub date is July 7th in the US and July 2nd in the UK. We’ll be announcing the many ways in which you can get bits versions of the book (audio, ebook, web) for free around pub date, but in the meantime, it’s time to start giving away some good old atoms!

With The Long Tail, we gave away 200 books to the first bloggers who asked for them and promised to review them (the “long tail of book reviewers”). That wo

A tragic tale of Free gone horribly wrong

Jon Lund, the head of the Danish Internet Advertising Bureau, and I had dinner in Norway last week and he told me the chilling story of the crazy free newspaper war in Denmark that almost killed everyone involved. I thought it was an important cautionary tale of Free gone wrong, and I encouraged him to write it up on his blog.

He did, and it’s well worth reading. I’ve excerpted (and lightly edited) the basic story below, but it’s worth reading it straight from the source to get Jon’s analysis,

Terrific survey of free business models online

From Box UK, a survey of business models used by the top Web apps, most of them variations of ad-supported Free and Freemium. In the chart below, the largest segment (ITA) is ad-supported, the second largest (ISV) is Freemium. After that is referral (ITR) and then the sale of virtual goods (IPV), such as the gifts in Facebook.

 

“We spent a few hours going through the Webware 100 Top Web Apps for 2008, analysing the business model(s) used by each. The chart below shows the results of this surv

My Letter to the Economist

To the Editor,

As a former Economist technology writer, I understand the attractions of “simplify, then exaggerate”. But in the case of your article on freeconomics (“The end of free lunch—again”, March 19th), you have done a bit too much of both.

First, where is your evidence that online advertising is a failing model?  To be sure, the crisis has dramatically slowed its growth, like that of every other industry, but unlike most others, it’s still positive. The worst forecasts for the year tha

I Am the Long Tailthe movie

The Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) has just released a seven-minute movie called “I Am the Long Tail”. Here’s an excerpt of their description:

Analysts estimate there are as many as 1.2 million Web sites that support themselves by selling advertising, through their own sales forces or ad networks. Most of them constitute the vaunted "long tail" -- small sites serving the refined interests of niche audiences, whose existence is premised on the Internet's near-barrierless opportunity to c

Open source is a company; social media is a country

At the Sourceforge breakfast this morning we got some questions on what the organizational differences are between open source and social media. Here’s my answer:

One of the paradoxes of early 20th Century management was the observation that companies are best run as dictatorships, while countries are best run as democracies. Why was this? Management theorist Charles Barnard, in his theory of the firm, proposed that it was because organizations existed for a common “shared purpose”.  Countries