Nothing these days is “free”

Chris Andersen’s Wired post really made me think. What exactly these days constitutes free? In my honest opinion, everything has a price, whether are not you are paying it directly or not.

It cannot be denied, the web is in a sense a commercialized gateway to the entire world. If you take the ability to make money off the world wide web, it falls apart. While many of us use services like Google or Gmail daily for free, SOMEONE out there in cyberspace is paying for our usage. It is the advertisers on Google that make it successful. If there are no advertisements, there is no income, and if there is no income, there is no money. If they have no money they can’t operate, and Google is dead. It isn’t free to run that company, their computing and intellectual resources cost millions of dollars yearly.

Google is a fantastic example. Likely millions of people use it daily, yet no one pays for the right to use it. For us, it is free, but that is just a benefit most of us take for granted in this Web 2.0 world we live in. We as a society need online commerce and business just as much as the companies who run the sites need it to reach their financial goals, because really these sites MAKE the world wide web what it is today.

In terms of consumer products available for free online, I am still sticking by my title of this post: Nothing is free these days. Personally, I think you can think of it in two ways:

1. You are either paying shipping costs or some membership fee of some sort.
2. Even in the case like the free ebook from Oprah, many are likely to continue buying this authors works.

Those are two examples I can think of. I think in 90% of all cases, if you get something “free” you really are paying for it someway or somehow.

My personal favorite example of this are the “pyramid” free iPod deals. Sure at the end of the day you may get an iPod you didn’t pay for, but at what cost? You likely had to sign up for a few offers that had to pay for, then you had to recruit friends to do the same. The companies who you signed up for paid for it. Like my previous Google example, “It’s not free, someone else paid for it.”

The Internet is intriguing in that sense. Overall, it seems free. You could entertain yourself for days and not pay for it, but like i’ve said countless times in this post “Nothing is really free.”

-dc