Basic economics tells us that in a competitive market, price falls to the marginal cost. There's never been a more competitive market than the Internet, and every day the marginal cost of digital information comes closer to nothing.
The moment a company's primary expenses become things based in silicon, free becomes not just an option but the inevitable destination.
What Mead understood is that a psychological switch should flip as things head toward zero. Even though they may never become entirely free, as the price drops there is great advantage to be had in treating them as if they were free.
This difference between cheap and free is what venture capitalist Josh Kopelman calls the "penny gap." People think demand is elastic and that volume falls in a straight line as price rises, but the truth is that zero is one market and any other price is another. In many cases, that's the difference between a great market and none at all.
The huge psychological gap between "almost zero" and "zero" is why micropayments failed.
Just because products are free doesn't mean that someone, somewhere, isn't making huge gobs of money.
To follow the money, you have to shift from a basic view of a market as a matching of two parties — buyers and sellers — to a broader sense of an ecosystem with many parties, only some of which exchange cash.
The most common of the economies built around free is the three-party system. Here a third party pays to participate in a market created by a free exchange between the first two parties. Sound complicated? You're probably experiencing it right now. It's the basis of virtually all media.
This is not simply the notion that advertising will pay for everything. There are dozens of ways that media companies make money around free content, from selling information about consumers to brand licensing, "value-added" subscriptions, and direct ecommerce
the opportunities to adopt a free business model of some sort have never been greater. But which one? And how many are there? Probably hundreds, but the priceless economy can be broken down into six broad categories:
"Freemium"

What's free: Web software and services, some content. Free to whom: users of the basic version.
A typical online site follows the 1 Percent Rule — 1 percent of users support all the rest.
· Advertising

What's free: content, services, software, and more. Free to whom: everyone.
· Cross-subsidies

What's free: any product that entices you to pay for something else. Free to whom: everyone willing to pay eventually, one way or another.
Expensive wine subsidizes food in a restaurant
omnipresence in the urban soundscape means that it gets huge crowds to its rave/dj/concert events. Free music is just publicity for a far more lucrative tour business. Nobody thinks of this as piracy.
· Zero marginal cost

What's free: things that can be distributed without an appreciable cost to anyone. Free to whom: everyone.
· Labor exchange

What's free: Web sites and services. Free to whom: all users, since the act of using these sites and services actually creates something of value.
· Gift economy

What's free: the whole enchilada, be it open source software or user-generated content. Free to whom: everyone.
It does. The word is externalities, a concept that holds that money is not the only scarcity in the world. Chief among the others are your time and respect, two factors that we've always known about but have only recently been able to measure properly. The "attention economy" and "reputation economy"
Thanks to Google, we now have a handy way to convert from reputation (PageRank) to attention (traffic) to money (ads). Anything you can consistently convert to cash is a form of currency itself, and Google plays the role of central banker for these new economies.
Free shifts the economy from a focus on only that which can be quantified in dollars and cents to a more realistic accounting of all the things we truly value today.

iPhone not selling in Japan - Gen Kanai weblog

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Words, Words, Words « The News from BardHaven

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True Blood Vampires Dig Sex, Gore and Wild Abandon | The Underwire from Wired.com

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Animefaniac: ONLINE ANIME Original Net Animation Attracts Fans

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Fandom: Identities and Communities in a Mediated World: Jonathan Gray, Cornel Sandvoss, C. Lee Harrington: Books

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Media, Learning, and Sites of Possibility (New Literacies and Digital Epistemologies): Marc Lamont Hill, Lalitha Vasudevan: Books

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Opinion Prone: Digital Distribution of Manga

Tags: non-academic, manga, copyright, scanlation, translation, digital_manga, internet, manga_industry, spurl_translation on 2008-08-22 -All Annotations (0) -About

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digital manga...? I have mixed feelings about how well this will work out. Unlike anime, the format of reading a book doesn't translate as neatly as the format of watching a show on a screen. Manga sales haven't lagged as much as DVD sales partially because many people still prefer holding a physical book in their hands as opposed to reading on a computer screen (the other reason might be because they're cheaper).
I'm not sure if scanlations have as much an impact on manga sales as fansubs do on DVD sales though. Various experiments conducted by both fiction and nonfiction authors suggest that the availability of an e-book actually boosts real book sales.
The pricing model Digital Manga is using is kind of interesting. It's cheaper than buying the physical thing by more than 50%. The experiment I mentioned above had the people release their e-books free, which spurred their real book sales.
I wonder if anyone will try to release digital manga by chapter shortly after release in Japan though. For long-running shounen series like Bleach and Naruto, it seems like it would be much easier than any attempt to release anime concurrently (though Crunchyroll and partners seem to be doing reasonably well). Viz already has the license. It doesn't take nearly as long to translate a chapter. It would be gold. Just figure out how to price a chapter.
The only issue would be that a chapter of manga is much easier to find online than an episode of anime, or at least, they're easier to access. No having to deal with torrents. You don't even have to download anything! Just pop over to Mangashare or Onemanga and you're set. Then again, if Viz did create a legal way for readers to have timely access to Japan's newest manga, I feel that many scanlators would hang up their work hats in good faith.