Giving It Away for Free

Ever since I first started playing around with stuff online, and that's exactly what I considered it, I have made a point of not paying for anything. I have abandoned that practice a couple of times, but in the main I've stuck to it. That's probably because my attitude toward the online world is hopelessly antediluvian. Nothing real happens online. It's all just play and diversion. If it's free, I'll give it a try. Otherwise, I generally give it a pass. And I maintain this point of view despite the obvious reality that the web is really all about commerce, and has been almost from the beginning.

So how exactly does the world of commerce co-exist with a virtual world where everything wants to be free -- information, music, photography, etc. How many of us would bother with blogging if we had to pay for the privilege, ignoring for the moment the attendant costs of hardware, software (that's why I use Linux), and connectivity. How does Blogger do it? How does Google afford to provide me with free email, free document storage, free software, etc? Do all of those ads that I never bother paying any attention to actually pay for all this fun?

Cathy Davidson asks some relevant questions about free content (and gratefully uses some as well) and also links to a piece by Scott Adams on why free sometimes has a cost. I have to admit these questions have bothered me for some time. How can we have it both ways? How can everything online remain free at the same time that many businesses are migrating to an online existence: music, writing, news and information, scholarship, etc. Who will pay the creators of online content? Why should we pay for online content when so much of it is free? Will good content that costs something eventually drive out bad content that is free, or vice versa? Think of Wikipedia and Britannica. Does anyone buy encyclopedias anymore?

I suppose that's what makes this all so interesting. I don't mind giving everything away for free because I get paid rather well to do something else, so my creative efforts, such as they may be, are subsidized by somebody else. But what if I wanted to make a living doing this sort of thing? How would I convince someone to pay me to give my stuff away, as so many bloggers seem to be able to do? Is advertising really so effective as a business model? Does anyone actually pay attention to online ads? How do hits get converted into cash? Or is it all like some impossible bubble that will eventually pop, a pyramid scheme that will eventually collapse, when it becomes obvious that it cannot be sustained? Or will we by then have become so addicted to Google and Blogger that we will be willing to pay for the privilege of wasting one another's time? If Google told us we would have to start paying a small fee to keep our accounts active, how many of us would fall in line?