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Ask HN: Is Free Dead?
12 points by Ardit20 on May 30, 2009 | hide | past | favorite | 15 comments
I was reading this article from FT titled: Media's want to break free. There are a couple of interesting things from my perspective. Firstly file sharing has been stagnating for the past 5 years, while legal downloading has been growing. This appears to suggest that the "visitors" or from now on "customers" have moved away from seeing the internet as a free for all to finding it acceptable to pay for say music.

I'd like to keep the question very general however, not narrowed to either music, newspapers or anything, but information online. Is it no longer viable or does it no longer make business sense to provide the information for free and rely on adverts, rather than charge the visitor?

Besides the business side, taking a "philosophical" perspective, would the internet stop being a force for good, if each person was asked to pay. Would this not create a great barrier to the freedom of information which has been such a strong force for progress and lifting of, at least many than otherwise, from poverty and as such, should any attempt to school the visitors to pay for content be resisted and make available any content for which payment is asked for free.

Personally, I view this from both a business and individual perspective. I, as I believe many here are, am very curious to learn about a variety of things from design to rhetorics. Being a student, and the many people here being in a start up, and the many people generally in the world being unable to afford to pay for the many content that they would like to read on the internet, is such a move just business greed which should be resisted?

Or should it instead be embraced as afterall many of the content providers do work rather hard and to see their work rewarded may be a generally good thing in itself and directly or indirectly contribute more greatly to progression of human kind as a whole by increasing the quality of information?

So, is free dead and should it be dead if it is not?



no its not dead, the only reason "paid" content started to pick up, is because the internet population has grown from techie geeks to include the general population.

The techie geeks will move heaven and earth to save $5, while other people will just shell out the $$$, figuring it's less than what they would pay for a meal at McDonalds


The default state of the world is free. Non-free happened because people decided that controlling content distribution for profit was a good idea, several hundred years ago. What if it isn't, or isn't anymore?

I can provide an example of how non-free would hurt you. If every site HN linked to was a pay-site then HN itself, Digg, Reddit, all those sites would suddenly cease to exist. All the fluidity of trading links back and forth would be gone as nobody would be able to afford to investigate what content is good anymore.

In fact, even Google would be in trouble if everything were a pay site. How could they possibly afford to pay to crawl every site on the internet? And, for that matter, what about all those startups that are based around data-mining existing web content?

The argument goes, "We can afford to produce better content by putting it behind a pay-wall." But when taken to the extreme, it's inefficient. No content is so good that it can replace the service of Google and other search engines. Or worse, in the ultra-non-free-world, Google would go from being a de-facto monopoly to a regulated monopoly; they strike up a pay-to-play deal for a site to even EXIST on their search engine and the entire Web is at their mercy. (we're not even talking about placement here)

It sounds ridiculous, but it's exactly the kind of thing we've let happen to copyright and patents in the past. By entering into these complex arrangements of enclosure, you end up with a battle between governments and big business that squashes the rights of individuals beneath regulation and fees.


prisoners dilemma. in your scenario it suddenly becomes ungodly profitable to be the one free act in town selling ad space. real life is somewhere in between the two extremes.

over time prices will come to reflect popularity if not quality.


Free is not dead and it never will be. Going forward people will always be able to distribute information for a negligible cost and many will chose to do so freely. From a business perspective the advertising business model is the only one that has had any widespread success for content and there aren't a lot of reasons to see this changing.


In other words: Free will be dead when Marketing is too.


That's some crazy grammar in the article headline. Is "media's" the possessive of the the plural of medium? And how does that make sense?


HN has an international audience, and for some English is not the first, nor second language. Bear with us please as we are doing our best to improve.


Sorry. I didn't realize that some of you were writing for the Financial Times.


Personally I think people download content, or use a service, because it's convenient not because they don't want to pay for it.

Slowly, but finally - paid for content is getting better... it's catching up.


The force of competition will keep free available for a long, long time to come. As long as the marginal cost of reproduction & distribution stays close to zero and the initial investment is not too high, free is a great model for a new product/content to gain wide market acceptance.

An alternative to free will only be available if the content/resource is scarce enough (i.e. high barrier to entry) that no more than a handful of producers can create a competitive product.

These conditions seem applicable to only a few niches.


According to Wired's Chris Anderson it's all but dead. His coming book is about this very subject, called "FREE". Until the release, take a look at this article (and video clip) by Anderson himself: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free, or at his own blog (which lately have been featuring several articles about "free"): http://www.longtail.com/the_long_tail/2007/05/my_next_book_f...


Here's the article: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/d0960f18-4303-11de-b793-00144feabd...


Is google adsense dead?


No, convenience was understood and price adjustments reflected that accordingly.

Charge $50 for a book and I'll pirate it.

Charge $20 for a music CD full of crap with just one interesting song and I'll pirate it.

Charge $30 for a movie a month later I can get for $5 at walmart and I'll pirate it.

Charge $50 for a console game and I'll pirate it.

Slowly but surely every industry understood they were raping us because we had no choice, now the internet offers choice and convenience.


"I think the word raped gets thrown around far too casually. You ever listen to a bunch of guys playing video games with each other online? It's like, 'Ah man you shot me in the back dude. You raped me dude!' I'm pretty sure if I talked to a woman who's been through that horrific situation and I said, 'What was it like, you know, being raped?' she's not gonna look at me and go, 'Have you ever played Halo?'"—Dane Cook -- via Shakesville




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