When it comes to any product, there are costs involved in its creation. For things such as cars or waffles or underpants, part of that cost is purely in raw materials. Each of these items is a physical good, requiring actual matter to create. The same is the case for items like DVDs, books, CDs and videogames. The difference in these verus the formerly mentioned physical goods, however, is that the vast majority of their primary value (the reason that someone actually wants them) can be replicated digitally, without raw materials other than those that are typically already possessed by people, such as free space on a hard drive. Their primary value is information, and as such it can be broken down into simple bits and bytes and easily distributed for minimal cost.
The other portion of the cost that both of these types of items have is the cost of actual manpower to create. There’s someone designing the underpants, just like there’s someone writing and performing the music. This even includes if a waffle was made by some sort of automatic waffle maker – that automatic waffle maker was created by manpower (or the robots that created it were created by people who programmed the robots). Or, if the music is completely computer-generated, someone created the computer program that allowed the music to be created. If a person’s time or talent has value, then creation has a cost.
The point I’m trying to make here is that everything has some sort of cost involved in creating it. Nothing is free to create.
With this cost come questions for creators. Do I pass any of that cost on to the consumer? What is my purpose for creating? What is the price of my creation?
If any of the reason for the creator is monetary, then there must be some price to be paid by someone for some aspect (no matter how vaguely connected) to your creation. If it’s not monetary, then what did you create it for? Was it simply to better the human race? Perhaps it was to strengthen the acceptance of a cause you feel strongly about. In both of those cases you’re at least charging the cost of a person’s time to consume your creation. There are plenty of creations out there that fall into all of these camps, and a lot more. As such, there’s a lot of competition out there.
The easiest way to compete in business is by offering a lower price. If you are okay with assuming your time, knowledge, talent and effort are worth nothing monetarily, then it’s easy to offer your content for free. With millions of people creating content today, a percentage of them are willing to offer their creations for free, and that percentage of a lot of people turns out to still be a lot of people. So what we have is a lot of content for free, competing with some content with a price. How does one compete with free? Continue reading →
