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There’s no such thing as Free. There is always a catch.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote a very provocative piece on The New Yorker about Wired’s Editor In Chief Chris Anderson’s book about the Free model: “Free: The Future of a Radical Price“.

In the article, Gladwell critizices Anderson’s ideas, specifically applied to YouTube’s case:

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.

In another section, Gladwell talks specifically about his world: journalism. Anderson writes on his book: “If so, leveraging the Free—paying people to get other people to write for non-monetary rewards—may not be the enemy of professional journalists. Instead, it may be their salvation”, to which Gladwell responds:

It is not entirely clear what distinction is being marked between “paying people to get other people to write” and paying people to write. If you can afford to pay someone to get other people to write, why can’t you pay people to write?

Anderson quickly replied to Gladwell on Wired’s blog with a provoking post: “Dear Malcolm: Why so threatened?“:

So that’s the difference between “paying people to write” and “paying people to get other people to write”. Somewhere down the chain, the incentives go from monetary to nonmonetary (attention, reputation, expression, etc).

Let me stop there and try to bring you a better level where we can start this conversation.