Freeconomics

Wired.com have an interesting article up on the economics of giving things away for free, and how in the end this can actually lead on to making money. This immediately made me think of the huge amount of content that podcasters are making several passages caught my eye:

'In the traditional media model, a publisher provides a product free (or nearly free) to consumers, and advertisers pay to ride along. Radio is "free to air," and so is much of television. Likewise, newspaper and magazine publishers don't charge readers anything close to the actual cost of creating, printing, and distributing their products. They're not selling papers and magazines to readers, they're selling readers to advertisers. It's a three-way market.'

That doesn't sound so much different to what your average 'caster can do. Obviously the revenue streams are still a little wonky, but the article also makes the point that the very act of putting something out there and having people then come and take/listen etc creates value. I'm not saying we should even really think about making money, but it does kind of make you think.

I think a lot of it can be applied to the internet, a lot of it rang true with what webcomic artist Scott Kurtz has said , and in fact he is involved in podcasting too with the Halfpixel webcomics cast actually pretty relevant to this site's aim. It literally is an audio production, and it also talks about the creative process and web marketing episode 29 , the latest seemed very helpful in this regard.