Best Quotes from Free by Chris Anderson with Page Numbers

"The rise of ‘freeconomics’ is being driven by the underlying technologies of the digital age."

"What Woodward understood was that ‘free’ is a word with an extraordinary ability to reset consumer psychology."

"'Free' didn’t mean profitless. It just meant that the route from product to revenue was indirect."

"In the bits economy, which is the online world, things get cheaper."

"The twentieth century was primarily an atoms economy. The twenty-first century will be equally a bits economy."

"Once hooked on disposable razor blades, you were a daily customer for life."

"Free is the tool of choice. The consumer never failed to respond."

"The trend lines that determine the cost of doing business online all point the same way: to zero."

"Now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we’re inventing a new form of Free, and this one will define the next era just as profoundly."

"Suddenly you could do things you could not afford to do before."

"Free" can mean many things, and that meaning has changed over the years.

The sense of "given without cost" is from 1585, from the notion of "free of cost."

This book is about the "cost" meaning: free, as in beer. Or, for that matter, lunch.

Cross-subsidies are the essence of the phrase "there's no such thing as a free lunch."

The hope is that the free consumers will attract paying consumers or that some fraction of the free consumers will convert to paying consumers.

Altruism has always existed, but the Web gives it a platform where the actions of individuals can have global impact.

In a sense, zero-cost distribution has turned sharing into an industry.

The incentives to share can range from reputation and attention to less measurable factors such as expression, fun, good karma, and satisfaction.

Sometimes the giving is unintentional, or passive.

Reversible business models... can create value in unexpected ways.

One of the reasons that Free is often so hard to grasp is that it is not a thing, but rather the absence of a thing.

The word 'zero' has Indian origins: The Indian word for zero was sunya, meaning 'empty,' which the Arabs turned into sifr.

In a sense that had been there all along. The word 'economics' comes from the Ancient Greek oikos ('house') and nomos ('custom' or 'law'), therefore 'rules of the house(hold).'

Even after most cultures established monetary economies, day-to-day transactions within close-knit social groups... was still mostly without price.

Charity, of course, is also a form of Free, as is communal giving, such as barn raisings and potlatches, Native American gift festivals.

The emergence of the five-day workweek, labor laws... created free time. That, in turn, created a boom in volunteerism (free labor) that continues today.

The irony was complete. Rather than undermining the music business, as ASCAP had feared, Free helped the music industry grow huge and profitable.

However, the saloon-keepers were betting that most customers would buy more than one drink, and that the allure of free food would attract patrons.

Abundance, from an evolutionary perspective, resolves itself, while scarcity needs to be fought over.

Economies flow toward abundance. Products that can become commoditized and cheap tend to do so, and companies seeking profits move upstream in search of new scarcities.

Free makes sense for a creator more interested in attention than income.

Anyone offering content free gains an advantage that can't be beaten, only matched.

Zero is not just another price—it turns out zero is an emotional hot button.

When something is FREE! we forget the downside.

There’s no visible possibility of loss when we choose a FREE! item.

Give a product away and it can go viral.

It is the lowest sum that is not too low to devalue the product.

Charging a price, any price, creates a mental barrier that most people won't bother crossing.

The demand you get at a price of zero is many times higher than the demand you get at a very low price.

Free plus Paid can span the full psychology of consumerism.

When something halves in price each year, zero is inevitable.

Ideas are the ultimate abundance commodity, which propagate at zero marginal cost.

He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine.

Moore’s Law is a violation of Murphy’s Law. Everything gets better and better.

At a certain point, they’re cheap enough to be safely disregarded.

You can try pricing schemes that would seem otherwise insane.

Like all famous quotes, Strauss’s is often misunderstood.

Waste is a dirty word, and that was especially true in the IT world of the 1970s.

The economics of abundance will drive transformation in every industry.

The more products are made of ideas, rather than stuff, the faster they can get cheap.

Access to computers—and anything that might teach you something about the way the world works—should be unlimited and total.

Information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable.

On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life.

Information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time.

Commodity information (everybody gets the same version) wants to be free. Customized information (you get something unique and meaningful to you) wants to be expensive.

Abundant information wants to be free. Scarce information wants to be expensive.

Paradoxes drive the things we care about.

You always wind up charging for something different than the information.

It’s poetical and mythical and it gets away from the finger-wagging ‘should.’

Value is coming from this peculiar form of sharing.

Although 3 million computers get sold each year in China, people don’t pay for our software.

Someday they will, though, and as long as they’re going to steal it, we want them to steal ours.

It’s easier for the newcomers than for incumbents.

One size doesn’t fit all.

The more the Yahoo executives thought about it, the worse it looked.

They realized that they probably couldn’t just match Google—to maintain their lead they would have to offer even more.

People’s email behavior didn’t change radically, and they continued to delete messages.

In the end, it worked: Yahoo didn’t lose any significant market share.

Yahoo Mail, rather than turning into a black hole of spending, remained profitable.

It competed with Google’s Free by becoming even more free.

It’s now become a tourist attraction: 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, California—the Citadel of Free.

Google makes so much money with advertising on a handful of core products—mostly search results and ads that other sites place on their own pages.

Setting out to build a huge audience before you have a business model is not as silly today as it was back in the dot-com era.

Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, gives would-be entrepreneurs simple advice: 'Build something people want.'

The marginal cost of distribution is free.

Take whatever it is you are doing and do it at the max in terms of distribution.

More is different. If only 1 percent of the hundred people in some school’s sixth-grade class volunteer to help make the yearbook, it doesn’t get done. But if just 1 percent of the visitors to Wikipedia decide to create an entry, you get the greatest trove of information the world has ever seen.

The Internet, by giving everybody free access to a market of hundreds of millions of people globally, is a liquidity machine.

Free, by its very nature, attracts people, but the marketplace efficiencies that come with Free ultimately keep them.

Free brings more liquidity to any marketplace, and more liquidity means that the market tends to work better.

"Free media is nothing new. What is new is the expansion of that model to everything else online."

"The miraculous ability of broadcast to reach millions of people simultaneously was forcing radio stations to invent what would become mass media—entertainment, news, and information of the broadest possible appeal."

"Perhaps we are just flattering ourselves with our church-and-state pursuit of purity, and readers don’t care or even notice if a Sony ad is next to a Sony review."

"The old broadcast model was, in essence, this: Annoy the 90 percent of your audience that’s not interested in your product to reach the 10 percent who might be."

"The Google model is just the opposite: Use software to show the ad only to the people for whom it’s most relevant."

"Free is the lowest-cost way to reach the largest number of people, and if the sample does its job, some will buy the 'superior' version."

"The aim is to build an ongoing relationship with the consumer, not just have a big weekend."

"Those who choose to pay are, by definition, the most engaged, most committed users, and as a result the least price-sensitive and the happiest about paying."

"What’s clear is that the nature of the advertisement is different online."

"The price expectations set online began to leak offline, too."

The countless unpaid services we do for one another every day, through kindness or social obligation, are free, but we don’t tally them.

The value of attention and reputation is clearly something, or companies wouldn’t spend so much on advertising to influence them.

The problem is we don’t have any idea of how much more attention and reputation there is in the world.

These are all good questions, and it will probably take yet another generation to answer them.

Free creates a lot of value around it, but like many things that don’t travel in the monetary economy, it’s hard to properly quantify.

There’s a lot of Free out there, and a lot of money to be made off it.

Imagine if they were producing automobiles!

Free is, in short, a country-sized economy, and not a little one, either.

How much of MySpace’s $65 billion estimated value is due to the free music bands put there?

What’s the value of a rainstorm or a sunny day? Both enrich the land, but the benefits are too diffuse to tabulate with any precision.

In abundant markets, where it’s easy to make more stuff, Bertrand tends to win; price often does fall to the marginal cost.

If 'price falls to the marginal cost' is the law, then free is not just an option, it’s the inevitable endpoint.

The Internet, by combining the democratized tools of production (computers) with democratized tools of distribution (networks), conjured the very thing that Bertrand had only imagined: a truly competitive market.

For every Google and Facebook, there are hundreds of thousands of companies that never get beyond niche markets. For them, there is no one answer: Every market is different.

The fundamental idea behind versioning involves selling similar products to different customers at different prices.

When you decide between regular and premium gas, you’re experiencing versioning, and so, too, when you see a matinee movie at half price or get a senior citizen discount.

Free is a constant attraction across all markets, but making money around Free... is a matter of creative thinking and constant experimentation.

Those same network effects that gave Microsoft its stranglehold on the desktop work just as well on the Web, as Google has all too ably demonstrated.

People like to contribute to an encyclopedia with a large readership; indeed, the enormous number of 'free riders'—aka users—is one of the most appealing things about being a Wikipedia editor.

It doesn’t take a PhD to understand why Free works so well online. You just have to ignore the first ten chapters or so of your economics textbook.

In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes.

Every abundance creates a new scarcity.

But what happens to man’s desires when there is plenty of bread and when his belly is chronically filled?

At once other (and higher) needs emerge, and these, rather than physiological hungers, dominate the organism.

Once our hunger for basic knowledge and entertainment is satisfied, we become more discriminating about exactly what knowledge and entertainment we want.

The economic value of your site is the traffic your PageRank brings from Google’s search results.

What if we could treat attention and reputation as quantitatively as we do money?

The gift must always move.

In a world where food, shelter, and the rest of Maslow’s subsistence needs are met without having to labor in the fields from dawn to dusk, we find ourselves with 'spare cycles'.

Doing things we like without pay often makes us happier than the work we do for a salary.

The best way to exploit abundance is to relinquish control.

When those costs have fallen to near zero, we don’t give it a second thought. It doesn’t feel like waste.

One generation’s scarcity is another’s abundance.

To fully explore the potential space, scattershot strategies are often the best.

Nature tests its creations by killing most of them quickly, the battle ‘red in tooth and claw’ that determines reproductive advantage.

The important thing is that every single opportunity for reproduction is exploited!

We’re ‘wasting video’ in search of better video, exploring the potential space of what the moving picture can be.

If you lower the costs of exploring a space, you can be more indiscriminate in how you do it.

Every possible niche will be explored.

We need to simultaneously pursue both control and chaos.

"Piracy is a form of zero-cost marketing, which brings their work to the largest possible audience."

"As far as she’s concerned, that’s 4 million fans she wouldn’t have had if they’d had to pay full price for the album."

"The moment you put a fee on accessing music in China is the moment you cut off 99 percent of your audience."

"This model works against that. We simply use free music and media as a way of saying that ‘everyone is welcome,’ building a dialogue, building a community."

"U.S. record sales fell by nearly 15 percent in 2008, and the bottom is nowhere in sight."

"Music creates celebrity. There are worse problems than the challenge of turning fame into fortune."

"The decision whether to buy a pirated Louis Vuitton bag is not a moral one, but one about quality, social status, and risk reduction."

"Per capita income has more than doubled in China in the last decade, and shows few signs of slowing."

"Letting others get their music for free creates a bigger industry than charging ever could."

"Free software isn’t just good for consumers, it’s good for the nation."

Science fiction is what writer Clive Thompson calls "the last bastion of philosophical writing."

It's a sort of simulation, Thompson says, where we change some of the basic rules and then learn more about ourselves.

How would love change if we lived to be five hundred?

Abundance comes at a cost: scarcity elsewhere.

In some of these books, the end of labor scarcity liberates the mind, ends wars over resources, and creates a civilization of spiritual, philosophical beings.

When the machines do all the work, what motivates us?

Material abundance created a scarcity of meaning.

Rather than depriving life of purpose, material abundance created a scarcity of meaning.

Economically, abundance is the driver of innovation and growth. But psychologically, scarcity is all that we really understand.

People don’t always recognize abundance when they first see it.

You have to pay for paper. You have to pay for pixels. It costs money.

If you aren’t paying for the lunch, your lunch partner is.

The world is full of markets that are not closed and tend to leak into the other markets around them.

Free isn’t what it used to be, especially on the Internet, whose very history and technology are based on the notion that information and pretty much everything else online want to be free.

You’re paying for the bits to be delivered to you but not for the value that’s in the bits themselves.

If something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

The only thing propping up the price is the law protecting intellectual property.

When something used to cost money and is now free, you might think less of it.

It’s easy to compete with Free: simply offer something better or at least different from the free version.

The first to Free gets attention, and there are always ways to turn that into money.