Oct 10 2010
Free
1) Anderson brings up a good point when he says that prices for individual components are often determined by psychology and not just cost. Are there any online companies that already use this tactic? What are some ways that more online services could harness this technique to create a more sustainable economic future?
This isn’t a question, just a note: the chapter on the psychology of free is freaking fascinating. His example with $10 magazine subscriptions makes so much sense, yet I’ve never heard it broken down that way before. Great points.
2) I’m not sure how the psychological model of free relates to the vast majority of websites. Can we view an advertisement that you must watch before you view content as the penny that he discusses on page 59? Also because advertising is the most prominent way that web sites make money, do we judge the types of brands advertised as equal to the value of the web site that we are using?
3) Anderson brings up an interesting point about the value that we place on the things that we pay for. We tend not to care as much about the items that we get for free. Is this true of information as well? I can’t say that I value information that I get online any less than information that I get from the books that I buy so I wonder if there is any correlation here.
October 13th, 2010 at 12:31 pm
1) I guess an example of this could be the one that Anderson uses when he describes Zappos’ technique for getting customers to buy in bulk even if it means returns. I think an even better example of this is the search features that almost every e-commerce sites use. You are usually given the choice to short through selections by price. While I usually search low – high because I’m a poor graduate student, there must be many other users who search price high-low because they have deemed the higher priced selections to be worth more. I was basing this question off of the example that he uses for a popular magazine that charges only $10 for a subscription. This example should certainly apply to more news sites than it currently does. I think it also ties into the point that Anderson makes about a user’s perceived value of a service vs the value that the creator or owner sees.
2) I don’t strictly judge a web site based on the types or style of design employed by the advertisers on a particular page. Just because I think an ad is tacky or that the featured product is stupid does not mean that I will stop visiting the hosting web site. I do judge the quality and reliability of that web site however. A web site loses some credibility in my mind if the advertising is completely random from that of the target audience for that site. We do live in a world where branding is king so brand name advertisements add to the appeal of a web site just like they do with celebrities and all of the kids that walk around this campus.
3) I do not think that Anderson’s model of waste applies to information in the same way that it applies to concrete objects. In fact I think that it is the opposite of information because my generation expects it to be free online. Making information inaccessible through the requirement of payment just makes me less interested in that information rather than making me want it more. This ties into his point about not being able to compete with free. On the flip side of this argument, if I buy a book, I will have that book for the rest of my life. I won’t be keeping some of the sources that I printed off for my paper though. So in this way I think that there is a connection between the values of information that comes at no price. I can recycle my printed database sources but always access them for free again and again using a computer. The catch is that this option is only open to me for as long as I am a student. I think this ties in to the points that Mike was making about an elitist view of access and understanding of online economies.