Chris Anderson Says: Free!

Following on from Daisy Whitney’s New Media Minute video blog about KickApps’ free programmable video player, Chris Anderson, the guy who made entrepreneurs include a ‘long tail’ strategy in every business plan, has a new book coming out called Free. This month’s cover story in Wired includes a 6,000 word excerpt from the upcoming book. Anderson breaks down ‘free’ business models, such as Freemium, ad supported and cross subsidies.

Free for us is about lowering the barriers to entry, eliminating risk and making KickApps as accessible as possible. When we have conversations with people about using KickApps, one of the points that we always make is: “It costs you nothing to use KickApps. All you have to do is sign up and you can start using the entire KickApps suite.”

Social media applications shouldn’t be about deployments that require $500k in software licensing fees and $1m in services just to realize 6 months into it that what you’ve bought doesn’t work or is obsolete. It should be about knowing exactly what you’re buying, being able to start building right away at as little cost as possible and getting your product out there.