Archive for the ‘Free’ Category
(Source: Rockstar Games)
Lawmaker calls for free, family-friendly wireless internet access open to the public; another auction required
With the internet littered with foul, explicit material, parents worry more and more about their children finding out what the internet fully has to offer. The solution, proposed by Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-CA), is to open up spectrum.
Eshoo proposed a new act on Monday, dubbed the Wireless Internet Nationwide for Families Act, instructing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to auction off 2155-2175MHz band of spectrum.
The winner of the auction of is required to use the spectrum to create free, nationwide wireless internet service that blocks all pornographic websites. It would be a service targeted directly towards families. Eshoo hopes the auctioning of the spectrum would attract types of national broadband service providers.
“The cost of broadband service is a barrier for too many families who want broadband, with more than 100 million Americans without broadband at home,” Eshoo said. “The results of the 700 MHz auction disappointed many of us who hoped that a new entrant would emerge. 70% of the spectrum auctioned went to only two carriers. While the auction required under this legislation is open to anyone, it is my hope that the bold conditions of requiring free, family friendly service will encourage the entry of a new kind of national broadband service provider.”
The two carriers Eshoo speaks of are Verizon and AT&T, already top-tier broadband carriers in the U.S.
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If you’re blogging, you’re most likely publishing content and making it freely available for public consumption. Everyone is able to access and read your articles as long as they have an internet connection.
Time to stop and think a little about this. Why are you giving away content for free? What are trying to achieve by doing so?
It is important to keep in mind the reasons why you are publishing blog post after blog post, all full of ideas and information and giving them away.
Do you know that you might generate more income by creating content and packaging it into the form of an affordable eBook, or perhaps a membership site? In terms of earning efficiency, premium/paid content might be a more lucrative venture than the act of simply giving away all your content away.
Chris Anderson recently suggested that ‘free’ is the future of business because the low cost of the digital web facilities the proliferation of free products, services or content. The web allows you to have greater flexibility in market definition: you can essentially give freebies to some, while selling to others.
Online publications are low-cost ventures. The biggest expense you’ll incur the time you’ll spend for content creation and site management since hosting fees/blogger salaries are scalable and relatively affordable.
On the other hand, cost may be more important in the eyes of your target audience:
From the consumer’s perspective, though, there is a huge difference between cheap and free. Give a product away and it can go viral. Charge a single cent for it and you’re in an entirely different business, one of clawing and scratching for every customer. The psychology of “free” is powerful indeed, as any marketer will tell you.
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.
Why I Am Giving Away Content for Free
Image Credit: totoro walking 3
Many friends have urged me to build a subscription-based membership site or write a eBook for sale. They tell me it’s the next step, because I’ve already developed a sizable audience. Unless you’re running a high volume and popular ad-driven news site, I do agree that its more profitable to write for a paying audience.
But what makes them willing to pay in the first place? Trust. They need to know that they’ll be getting value, before they’ll fork out money from their pocket. In a way, this is why you overlook certain brands in the supermarket or shopping mall, in favor of other more established, familiar and popular brands.
Price alone is never enough to completely offset the lack of trust. You might hook a few early adopters with your free offering but to really generate income in the long term requires the constant improvement of perceived product and brand value.
Monetization can be based on two factors: pageviews or influence. The first involves creating content and using it as a means to get traffic, which converts into ad income. Influence involves creating content to develop your brand equity and then selling services or products which leverage one’s established market trust.
They are not mutually exclusive, although I think a more concentrated focus on either factor from the start will lead to better end results.
Book authors often give away free chapters of their book and/or run a blog which provides free content related to the book in order to generate interest. Apart from serving as lead generators and sales boosters, content has a branding value:
There is, presumably, a limited supply of reputation and attention in the world at any point in time. These are the new scarcities — and the world of free exists mostly to acquire these valuable assets for the sake of a business model to be identified later.
The truth is, if you want to sell more products or services, you need to develop a reputation which exceeds your slogan, sales letter or promised benefit. Free content is a tool which helps you to develop publicity. It will eventually generate demand for services, products and premium content.
I do have many websites and online projects in mind to execute this year. In the meanwhile, I’m using content to attract attention and build a following. I’m not interested in making Dosh Dosh a big money maker, which is why I’ve refrained from paid editorials, excessive advertising and voluminous posting.
I primarily use this blog as a brand building platform, one that may support the launch of relevant initiatives in the future. That’s my reason for giving away free content. I think its quite important to have a clear idea of the rationale behind ‘free’. Is it just the altruistic wish to share information? Maybe there’s more to it.
Why are you giving away content for free? I would love to hear your opinion.
The Clean Energy Scam
Posted on: March 29, 2008
From his Cessna a mile above the southern Amazon, John Carter looks down on the destruction of the world’s greatest ecological jewel. He watches men converting rain forest into cattle pastures and soybean fields with bulldozers and chains. He sees fires wiping out such gigantic swaths of jungle that scientists now debate the “savannization” of the Amazon. Brazil just announced that deforestation is on track to double this year; Carter, a Texas cowboy with all the subtlety of a chainsaw, says it’s going to get worse fast. “It gives me goose bumps,” says Carter, who founded a nonprofit to promote sustainable ranching on the Amazon frontier. “It’s like witnessing a rape.”
The Amazon was the chic eco-cause of the 1990s, revered as an incomparable storehouse of biodiversity. It’s been overshadowed lately by global warming, but the Amazon rain forest happens also to be an incomparable storehouse of carbon, the very carbon that heats up the planet when it’s released into the atmosphere. Brazil now ranks fourth in the world in carbon emissions, and most of its emissions come from deforestation. Carter is not a man who gets easily spooked–he led a reconnaissance unit in Desert Storm, and I watched him grab a small anaconda with his bare hands in Brazil–but he can sound downright panicky about the future of the forest. “You can’t protect it. There’s too much money to be made tearing it down,” he says. “Out here on the frontier, you really see the market at work.”
This land rush is being accelerated by an unlikely source: biofuels. An explosion in demand for farm-grown fuels has raised global crop prices to record highs, which is spurring a dramatic expansion of Brazilian agriculture, which is invading the Amazon at an increasingly alarming rate.
Propelled by mounting anxieties over soaring oil costs and climate change, biofuels have become the vanguard of the green-tech revolution, the trendy way for politicians and corporations to show they’re serious about finding alternative sources of energy and in the process slowing global warming. The U.S. quintupled its production of ethanol–ethyl alcohol, a fuel distilled from plant matter–in the past decade, and Washington has just mandated another fivefold increase in renewable fuels over the next decade. Europe has similarly aggressive biofuel mandates and subsidies, and Brazil’s filling stations no longer even offer plain gasoline. Worldwide investment in biofuels rose from $5 billion in 1995 to $38 billion in 2005 and is expected to top $100 billion by 2010, thanks to investors like Richard Branson and George Soros, GE and BP, Ford and Shell, Cargill and the Carlyle Group. Renewable fuels has become one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie catchphrases, as unobjectionable as the troops or the middle class.
But several new studies show the biofuel boom is doing exactly the opposite of what its proponents intended: it’s dramatically accelerating global warming, imperiling the planet in the name of saving it. Corn ethanol, always environmentally suspect, turns out to be environmentally disastrous. Even cellulosic ethanol made from switchgrass, which has been promoted by eco-activists and eco-investors as well as by President Bush as the fuel of the future, looks less green than oil-derived gasoline.
Meanwhile, by diverting grain and oilseed crops from dinner plates to fuel tanks, biofuels are jacking up world food prices and endangering the hungry. The grain it takes to fill an SUV tank with ethanol could feed a person for a year. Harvests are being plucked to fuel our cars instead of ourselves. The U.N.’s World Food Program says it needs $500 million in additional funding and supplies, calling the rising costs for food nothing less than a global emergency. Soaring corn prices have sparked tortilla riots in Mexico City, and skyrocketing flour prices have destabilized Pakistan, which wasn’t exactly tranquil when flour was affordable.
Biofuels do slightly reduce dependence on imported oil, and the ethanol boom has created rural jobs while enriching some farmers and agribusinesses. But the basic problem with most biofuels is amazingly simple, given that researchers have ignored it until now: using land to grow fuel leads to the destruction of forests, wetlands and grasslands that store enormous amounts of carbon.
Backed by billions in investment capital, this alarming phenomenon is replicating itself around the world. Indonesia has bulldozed and burned so much wilderness to grow palm oil trees for biodiesel that its ranking among the world’s top carbon emitters has surged from 21st to third according to a report by Wetlands International. Malaysia is converting forests into palm oil farms so rapidly that it’s running out of uncultivated land. But most of the damage created by biofuels will be less direct and less obvious. In Brazil, for instance, only a tiny portion of the Amazon is being torn down to grow the sugarcane that fuels most Brazilian cars. More deforestation results from a chain reaction so vast it’s subtle: U.S. farmers are selling one-fifth of their corn to ethanol production, so U.S. soybean farmers are switching to corn, so Brazilian soybean farmers are expanding into cattle pastures, so Brazilian cattlemen are displaced to the Amazon. It’s the remorseless economics of commodities markets. “The price of soybeans goes up,” laments Sandro Menezes, a biologist with Conservation International in Brazil, “and the forest comes down.”
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