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By Dave Hendricks
If you’re a reader of popular business hagiographies like Outliers and Good to Great, you’ve probably already devoured Free: The Future of a Radical Price, by Chris Anderson, executive editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail. I did. I advance ordered and paid the hefty $26.99 cover price so I could be among the first to earn the honor of paying full cover price for a book called Free. Abby Hoffman is spinning in his grave.
If you haven’t had a chance to buy and read Free, let me save $26.99 for you. Free promotes the “freemium” concept: the virtue of giving things away now in exchange for a revenue stream down the road. For magazines this is not exactly new. “Free” sounds an awful lot like the strategy that magazine Web sites have been pursuing for the last 10 years: “Publish it free (online) and they will come.”
Does this work? If you go by the author’s own example—his charging $26.99 for his book—it seems as if it’s a great solution for everyone else but him.
Technically, Anderson is giving away Free for free, at least on one platform. Shortly after the release on July 7, he started to give the book away—but only for the Kindle, and only through Amazon.com. But if you are getting this book free from Amazon to run on your $300 Kindle, don’t be surprised if it disappears mysteriously sometime down the road, like all copies of George Orwell’s novels Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four did on July 16 when Amazon.com remotely deleted them without warning.
This isn’t a review of Free the book. For that, I’ll refer you to Malcolm Gladwell’s articulate and pointed critique in The New Yorker. You may be familiar with Mr. Gladwell, an old-media New York Times reporter who has benefited from paid purchases of his hardcover best-sellers The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers. You can bet he has a dog in this fight, but his dog has learned a lot of old tricks about making money. And he’s no fan of “free.”
But what can magazines learn from Free and how can they apply such lesson to helping them make the digital transition? There are several ways, and not all of them are that new. Here are some ways b2b and b2c magazines leverage the “free” ideal.
- Provide free access to your archives. Letting anyone access most of your Web site content is a good start on the free model. Advocates of the freemium model believe free access breaks down obstacles to distribution of content and will grow your audience. If 5% of these free customers convert to paying—or freemium—customers, they will pay for the rest.
- Open up your webinars to qualified attendees at no cost. Any price is a barrier to registration. If you are a b2b trade magazine, promoting your advertisers through free webinars will attract a larger audience. Studies have shown that even $1 is too much to charge in some cases. The advertiser will get more leads and you will expose your valuable content to more potential freemium customers.
- Send out emails that have links to premium content. You can find advertisers who will sponsor these high opening emails and offset any planned revenue from Web site sales that you think you might have lost. Your advertisers love direct contact and will pay to subsidize your giveaways.
- Employ the services of guest bloggers and contributors not on your payroll. As a Minsider I am not paid by minonline to write these articles, but I am happy to get distribution while min and its readers incur no cost. Celebrity authors and industry experts can help drive more page views and subscriptions. The Huffington Post is one of the best at these strategies, and the examiner.com is another example to follow.
Yes, there are costs to all of these free services, but in the end, if you know how to monetize an audience through email, Web display and freemium programs, you will more than likely grow your business by embracing the concept of “free”—the radical price of now and the future.
Minsiders columnist Dave Hendricks is EVP, strategy and planning, Datran Media.
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Your assertion regarding the free availability of Anderson's book is incorrect: Audible.com (amazon.com owned) also offers it as a free audiobook.
Audible introduced that after I wrote the piece. I wasn't asserting that Anderson doesn't himself believe in 'free', but he does apply it selectively. And 'free' can only be applied selectively in any case.