Free: The Future of a Radical Price First Edition Edition

by Chris Anderson (Author)

196 customer reviews

ISBN-13: 978-1401322908

ISBN-10: 1401322905

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The New York Times bestselling author heralds the future of business in Free.

In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that in many instances businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. Far more than a promotional gimmick, Free is a business strategy that may well be essential to a company's survival.

The costs associated with the growing online economy are trending toward zero at an incredible rate. Never in the course of human history have the primary inputs to an industrial economy fallen in price so fast and for so long. Just think that in 1961, a single transistor cost $10; now Intel's latest chip has two billion transistors and sells for $300 (or 0.000015 cents per transistor--effectively too cheap to price). The traditional economics of scarcity just don't apply to bandwidth, processing power, and hard-drive storage.

Yet this is just one engine behind the new Free, a reality that goes beyond a marketing gimmick or a cross-subsidy. Anderson also points to the growth of the reputation economy; explains different models for unleashing the power of Free; and shows how to compete when your competitors are giving away what you're trying to sell.

In Free, Chris Anderson explores this radical idea for the new global economy and demonstrates how this revolutionary price can be harnessed for the benefit of consumers and businesses alike.

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Product Details

Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Hyperion; First Edition edition (July 7, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1401322905
ISBN-13: 978-1401322908
Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (196 customer reviews)
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #501,506 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #263 in Books > Textbooks > Business & Finance > Economics > Microeconomics
- #340 in Books > Business & Money > Economics > Money & Monetary Policy
- #421 in Books > Business & Money > Economics > Microeconomics

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Customer Reviews

196

3.9 out of 5 stars

5 star		37%
4 star		34%
3 star		14%
2 star		9%
1 star		6%

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful

Making Free Work!

By O. Halabieh on November 2, 2013

Format: Paperback Verified Purchase

Below are key excerpts from the book that I found particularly insightful:

1- "The "free" part of freemium is simple, but the "premium" part is tricky. Every company and industry is different, and each business must figure out what its customers will pay for even as it uses Free to attract them in the first place. Although the book includes hundreds of examples of how successful firms found premiums to go with their frees, there are countless others. There is no silver bullet, no universal freemium model that can offer salvation to all. Making Free work is hard, which is why it's sometimes so scary."
2- "Those who understand the new Free will command tomorrow's markets and disrupt today's—indeed, they're already doing it. This book is about them and what they're teaching us. It is about the past and future of a radical price."

3- "Today the most interesting business models are in finding ways to make money around Free. Sooner or later every company is going to have to figure out how to use Free or compete with Free, one way or another. This book is about how to do that."

4- "Cross-subsidies can work in several different ways: Paid products subsidizing free products...Paying later subsidizing free now...Paying people subsidizing free people."

5- "Most transactions have an upside and a downside, but when something is FREE! we forget the downside. FREE! gives us such an emotional charge that we perceive what is being offered a as immensely more valuable than it really is. Why? I think it's because humans are intrinsically afraid of loss. The real allure of FREE! is tied to this fear. There's no visible possibility of loss when we choose a FREE! item (it's free).Read more ›

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Five Stars

By C2M on July 6, 2015

Format: Hardcover Verified Purchase

Great, thank you!

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Thought Provoking

By J.Ilog on December 26, 2014

Format: Hardcover

The below reviews all give an accurate depiction on this excellent book on sales strategy.

5 star reviews by:
Daniel E. Ripoli (September 4, 2014), bronxbooknerd (August 19, 2009), Ron Coia (July 25, 2010), Chris Tucker (August 17, 2012), James Fonseca (January 1, 2010), Rolf Dobeli (August 25, 2009), Will (December 19, 2011), Philip Simon (November 8, 2009), and Joshua G. Feldman (July 7, 2009)--he provides a great summary.

The 4 star reviews by:
Omar Halabieh (November 2, 2013)--another great summary, Lindsey (January 19, 2010) and Nicholas Paolella (November 28, 2010), Donny (April 1, 2011), Mario Sanchez Carrion (October 24, 2009), Sten (April 11, 2011), Mrana (April 10, 2011), burkey (April 9, 2011), Ryan Paul (April 5, 2011), Pichler (July 3, 2013).

The 3 star reviews by:
C. J. Pearmon (August 15, 2009) and The Marketing Guy Who Drives Sales -r (December 3, 2009)

It is divided into 3 sections:
1) "What is Free?"--Gives a short course on the word Free, along with its history and psychology.
2) "Digital Free"--Describes how information on the web wants to be free and how free has defined the digital age,
3) "Freeconomics and the Free World"--Describes how Free has become the law of Digital Economics, along with its economics (& related economic studies) and abundance vs. scarcity.

Many corporate examples are used, including WSJ, Microsoft, Zappos, YouTube, Yahoo, Google and the countries of China & Brazil.

It also describes 50 business models built on Free, falling into 3 genres:

1)Direct Cross Subsidies "...where a few paying customers are subsidizing many unpaying ones" (16 examples are provided.Read more ›

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Very interesting take on the rise of the non-monetized economy, so to speak

By DaleO on August 17, 2014

Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase

Very interesting take on the new developments, brought in by the internet, especially non-monetized aspects such as blogging, wiki, open source software, etc.. The book was written a few years ago, so a chapter about new developments would have been useful. But I acknowledge that it isn't easy to be totally up to date in an area like this, and his blog and magazine (Wired) probably are the place to go for supplementary information.

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2 of 4 people found the following review helpful

I Got It Free, But It Is Worth Paying $9.99 For!

By Paige Turner on July 31, 2009

Format: Kindle Edition Verified Purchase

Free is a well-written book by Chris Anderson, the editor of my favorite magazine, Wired. The style and tone of the book is much like the long articles in Wired magazine. If you like those long articles and are interested in pricing models of various businesses, you will like this book. If not, it may be too much detail. (Some have quibbled with his use of Wikipedia for research, to me, it fits in with his thesis that information wants to be free, and takes nothing from his work.)

Anderson's thesis is that "making money around free will be the future of business." In the digital world, marginal costs are near-zero, in contrast to the world of "atoms." As he states in his book, for many, especially the generation that has grown up with the internet, "the response is usually `And?' It seems self-evident to them." This was exactly my reaction. Nevertheless, the book was worth reading.

My favorite key points:

"Between 1980 and 1990, the world's population grew by more than 800 million. But by September 1990, without a single exception, the price of (various metals) had fallen, and in some cases had dropped through the floor." Great argument against all the commodity bulls.

The same "genius" that predicted commodity prices to go up also predicted famines of "unprecedented proportions." This looks ridiculous now, with the massive obesity epidemic. The author slyly notes this genius still received a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award. Great point about how so-called experts are awful at making accurate predictions.Read more ›

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

Four Stars

Freedom

Published 18 days ago by RYAN GAFFNEY

My Free review

This is a very interesting hybrid of a book. It is about the human mind, how advertising works, how to get things to catch on. Read more

Published 1 month ago by Mr. Jared C. Serra

Five Stars

Great Seller! Immediate service. Very HAPPY!

Published 1 month ago by Shopper with a heart!

Useful info for 2010, but a bit badly structured as a book.

This book starts out strong, but gets kinda lost along the way and has no finale. He does explain how FREE has always been part of marketing. Read more

Published 1 month ago by Sam Rosenthal

Five Stars

Most informative!

Published 5 months ago by Patrick

Spooky

This is great book but I should have read it before. It is really recommended every companies in digital world.

Published 7 months ago by Metin Arghan

Brilliant and insightful

Great book. Very insightful. It brings to light many of the ways in which astute entrepreneurs have leveraged free as a way to amass large audiences and open up ancillary (but... Read more

Published 10 months ago by Daniel E Ripoll

All Internet player should read it

the book explained the inevitable trend of internet. Give examples of how different industry and people handled this trend. It was a good reading.

Published 12 months ago by Yudan Jin

Very interesting ideas...

Very interesting ideas presented in a very concise way. I look forward to putting many of these ideas into practice in my business.

Published 13 months ago by Ralph Velasco

Read it when I first bought a computer.

Anticipates how corporations with foresight are using the concept of 'free' offers to advertise online. Read more

Published 13 months ago by Robert Michael Fink