Foreign Perspectives

These days it’s pretty much came to be taken for granted that everything is “free” in one way or another and one of the chief theorists of this is interviewed on the 123-reg blog.

Of course, somebody pays for all this “free” stuff and many Internet companies are an experiment in working out how to get money without directly charging the users for the products on their websites. Chris Anderson’s new book is all about this although interestingly he’s not, yet, worked out a way to give it away and still make money from it.

That’s the central issue of course. Google isn’t free. It’s paid for by all those adverts that you see displayed on it and that advertising led model is what’s behind most “free” websites that you see these days. It can be confusing for some people to see sites charging for a product whilst others offer it free but in reality the economics behind those “free” sites are little different from those behing the sites that charge.

Will “free” be the way of the future for the Internet? Who can say at this point? Certainly there are many information services that are free these days but which were formally quite expensive to aquire and that seems a trend that’s likely to continue. I personally don’t see us reaching a point where everything is free (ie ad-supported) though.

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