Scott Cleland–who works at the nexus of capital markets, public policy and techcom–has a problem with free. He’s not the only one.
The dotcom bubble ethos that “information wants to be free” is like a gross mold destroying the incentives to create and distribute valuable content digitally.
Let’s take a analytical slice across both the content economy and the digital “ecommony” in order to fully grasp the atrociousness of the economics of the oxymoronic “free” digital business model. Lets take a great comparative metric: average revenue per month generated per user/viewer/audience.
TV/Cable/Satellite/Newspapers all generate roughly $40-$60 of revenue per reached consumer per month which is:
~15 times more than AOL;
~20 times more than Google;
~300 times more than Facebook; and
~1650 times more than eBay’s Skype.
Of course, this is a topic we’ve addressed before and will continue to address. Why is AdPulp free? Is it because you won’t pay for the content here? Or is it because we’ve not asked you to pay for the content?
While we seek the answers to these non-rhetorical questions, it would be great to see some of our biggest supporters step forward to become sponsors.
