Wired Magazine’s editor in chief Chris Anderson, wrote a new book entitled “The Future of a radical Price“, where he outlines the future of media content concerning pricing. And he does so with a suprisingly counterintuitive prediction.
 
It begins with this video, Disruption By Design. Aside from a disruption caused by shoddy cameramanship, (the person shooting this video needs to be fired immediately, seriously), he basically outlines a picture that disruptions are here to stay, they are our future whether we like them or not. So the only way to prepare for the disruptions, is to become the disruptive force, be the driver of disruptive change by creating disriptive technologies.
 
Chris goes on to state that small groups and individuals tend to be quicker at adapting to disruptions and creating new disruptive technologies than large corporations or governments. One can then conclude that the future to successful enterprises will be in their ability to shrink themselves down to the smallest group possible in order to handle disruptions while retaining their overall connectivity with the larger group.
 
I think this is already evident in the form of spinoff’s, incubators, idea labs and skunk works projects. This is a trend that will continue, and how comanies organize themsleves to deal with and respond to disruptions will be a large determing factor to their success.
 
In Chris’s new book “The Future of a Radical Price”, he outlines the biggest disruptive force to hit the media. And in fact, this disruption is already here and being dealt with by anyone doing business online. Even Rupert Murdoch gave his opinion on free versus paid media content. 
 
The premise outlined in Chris’s book states that as products go digital, their marginal costs goes to zero. “This is the law of gravity online” he says. “Everything that becomes digital will become free. There will be a free version, either you will be competing with free or giving it away for free and selling something else. If it is not zero today, it will be zero tomorrow.”
 
Pretty harsh disruptive force indeed. So how will businesses make money online with digital content? Chris outlines 4 methods:

1. The best model is a mix of free and paid.
2. You can’t charge for an exclusive that will be repeated elsewhere.
3. Don’t charge for the most popular content on your site.
4. Content behind a pay wall should appeal to niches, the narrower the niche the better

These last 2 points come as a suprise, and almost counterintuitive to what most web enpreneures believe. What Chris is in fact saying is, don’t charge for all your most popular media content, that which is driving your traffic. That will drive your ad revenue.
 
The content you need to charge for, is the long tail niche content, the hard to find and obtain content. While it’s true that fewer people will be interested in that content, they will however be more willing to pay for it.
 
Anderson’s last book was “the Long Tail”, where he predicted that in media, “The head of the curve will be free and the tail of the curve will be paid.”