Hitting the Toaster, Hoping for Money

The Long Tail, a book by the editor of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, was published in 2006 and went on to become a best-seller.

I did not read The Long Tail because, before I had a chance to purchase it, I read this and this and especially this. It seemed Mr. Anderson’s theory wasn’t exactly wrong, but was so vastly overstated and misapplied that it lost much of its credibility.

Now, I bear absolutely no ill will toward the author--except when his magazine prints in a font two sizes too small—and hope he becomes rich or, I suspect, richer.

I just don’t want any of his wealth, in this instance, coming from me.

More recently, Chris Anderson has written Free: The Future of a Radical Price, and just as I was about to purchase it, a friend sent me this. It seems Malcolm Gladwell, whose books I do purchase (and love), has taken Mr. Anderson to task in Free for precisely the same sin committed in his first book: over-reaching.

When a theory works over here, it works. Hooray. But if it doesn't work over there, too, then there’s no sense in trying to make it so. Theories have limits like everything else.

Gladwell says it better that I:

The only problem is that in the middle of laying out what he sees as the new business model of the digital age Anderson is forced to admit that one of his main case studies, YouTube, “has so far failed to make any money for Google.”

Why is that? Because of the very principles of Free that Anderson so energetically celebrates. When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer. That’s the magic of Free psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down,” “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number.

I have written once, and remind you again, about the little boy who takes a hammer and hits his piggy bank, only to have all the money come flying out.

What does he do next? He hits everything in the house hoping money will fly out.

If your theory is that money comes out of a piggy bank, I buy it. Write a book and tell me about it. (I'll buy it--on my Kindle 2. :) But please don’t feel the need to convince me that money comes out of a toaster, too.

In this age of staggering economic uncertainty, the value you’ve provided me--to keep my eyes open and be on the ready with my hammer for the next available piggy bank--is a small certainty that still provides great value indeed.

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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