Free: The Future Of A Radical Price

"Chris Anderson's Free unpacks a paradox of the online marketplace--people making money charging nothing. What was once just a marketing gimmick has morphed into the basis of a trillion-dollar economy."
- Newsweek

The New York Times bestselling author examines the rise of pricing models which give products and services to customers for free, often as a strategy for attracting users and up-selling some of them to a premium level. That class of model has become widely referred to as "freemium" and has become very popular for a variety of digital products and services. (from Wikipedia)

"The thought-provoking material is matched by a delivery that is nothing short of scintillating."
- Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"I'd put Anderson and his work on par with Malcolm Gladwell and Clayton M. Christensen as one of the more important pieces of business philosophy published in the emerging global, digital era."
- Alan T. Saracevic, San Francisco Chronicle

Chris Anderson is a British-American author and entrepreneur. He was with The Economist for seven years before joining WIRED magazine in 2001, where he was the editor-in-chief until 2012. He is known for his 2004 article entitled The Long Tail; which he later expanded into the 2006 book, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. He is currently the cofounder and CEO of 3DRobotics, a drone manufacturing company. (from Wikipedia)

the twentieth century saw people starting to embrace free again as a concept, it also witnessed a crucial phenomenon that helped to make free a reality—the arrival of abundance. For most previous generations, scarcity—of food, of clothing, or of shelter—was a constant concern. For those born in the developed world in the past half century or so, however, abundance has been the keynote. And nowhere has that abundancelawnat abunda been more apparent than in that fundamental prerequisite for life: food.

When I was a kid, hunger was one of the main problems of poverty in America. Today, it's obesity. Something dramatic has changed in the world of agriculture in the past four decades— we got much better at growing food. A technology-driven revolution turned a scarce commodity into an abundant one. And in that story lie clues to what can happen when any major resource shifts from scarcity to abundance.

There are only five major inputs to a crop: sun, air, water, land (nutrients), and labor. Sun and air are free, and if the crop is grown in an area with plenty of rainfall, water can be free, too. The remaining inputs—primarily labor, land, and fertilizer—are very much not free, and they account for most of the price of crops.

In the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution mechanized agriculture, radically lowering the cost of labor and increasing crop yield. But it was the "Green Revolution" of the 1960s that really transformed the economics of food by making farming so efficient that fewer people had to do it anymore. The secret of this second revolution was chemistry.

For most of human history manure has determined how much food we had. Agricultural yield was limited by the availability of fertilizer, and that largely came from animal (and sometimes human) waste. If a farm wanted to support both animals and crops in a synergistic nutrient cycle, it had to split its land

We've heard that information wants to be free. We're all for it as long as we are on the receiving rather than the giving end. The value of Chris Anderson's work is in showing us exactly how "free" can work.

It turns out 'free' is not a new idea: think radio and television in the days of antennas. M

This book was written during the initial years of the Social Media/Apps boom when people hadn't gotten used to the idea of being the product themselves (i.e. their data being sold to the highest bidders).
While everyone gleefully lapped up the 'free' services offered by the Apps, Chris was one of th

I thought this was a really illuminating audio-back as someone who works in the tech industry.

Meaning I understood many of the basic principles that make the software industry different from regular ones (zero marginal cost for software products) but I hadn't really grasped many of the economic imp

The gist of it is that the price of almost everything will gradually be driven towards being free (in its various forms). Considering this book was released in 2009, in the eight years since, we can already see how much of it turned out to be true. An informative read overall.

Great Book !! I love the way that he explained things by using the concept of economics.

Obviously this is written by someone who barely passed Econ 101 or Media/Marketing History core coursework for his bach's degree. Its a shame that so few journalist today have received a decent classical education in order to understand what is research, what is analysis and what is valuable literat

A business classic that everyone should read. Explains 20th century and 21st century economics from a big picture perspective. The basic thesis is that while in the physical world (atoms), products have cost and thus companies can afford to give away small amounts of free samples (5%), or give away

Chris Anderson

FREE: The Future of a Radical Price

Chris Anderson

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