When Paul Romer expresses an opinion, it is always worthwhile to listen because it is always well-considered. In an opinion piece in the New York Times, he puts forward a proposal to restore what he terms is the "public commons" of the provision of information in support of democracy. He actually puts forward two linked …
The Podcast Business Model
This week saw the launch of a new podcast startup, Luminary. With $100 million in the bank and podcasters like Trevor Noah and Adam Davidson signed up, they are hoping to become the Netflix of Podcasts. To access that content costs $7.99 but the content is ad-free. They had a post on Twitter proclaiming that …
Free Software without a Free Lunch or Free Beer
Economists like to say that there are no free lunches. How does that attitude apply to free software and services? It is no secret that many prominent platforms give away services, and so do many widely used open-source projects. The answer should help us understand our world. While it costs next to nothing to replicate …
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The Value of Free in GDP
Did the rise of free information technology improve GDP? It is commonly assumed that it did. After all, the Internet has changed the way we work, play, and shop. Smartphones and free apps are ubiquitous. Many forms of advertising moved online quite a while ago and support gazillions of “free” services. Free apps changed leisure long ago—just ask any teenager or any parent …
Apple makes changes to the App Store
Apple announced two major changes to the App Store for its various software platforms (iPhone, iPad and OSX). The first would be to allow search based advertising. The second would be to reform subscription pricing. These are large changes as I will explain below. Search-based Advertising A little appreciated fact is that apps themselves have …
Ad-blocking research written up by the AEA
In light of the recent debate on ad-blocking, the AEA has decided to highlight my research with Simon Anderson on the topic on their website. It is a really good summary including an interactive graphic of our main result.
How about a contingent ad-blocker?
Discussions about ad-blockers are all the rage. This is because Apple's new iOS 9 allows you to put content blockers on the Safari web browser. Thus, this technology is brought to the mobile web; something one can guess Google will be reluctant to do on Android. Anyhow, I wrote about the broad issues here. I, …
Should Facebook be paying us?
Probably not. In the New Yorker, Tim Wu argues for yes. His argument is simple. Facebook make money because they collect data that their users freely give them. For the most valuable innovation at the heart of Facebook was probably not the social network (Friendster thought of that) so much as the creation of a …
How sure are we that Ad-blocking software will ruin the free Internet?
Ad-blocking software is to the advertising based Internet what Tivo was supposedly to broadcast television: with a little investment, users can consume content without the ads. As Simon Anderson and I pointed out some years ago in a paper published in the American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, since ads are annoying, users will have an incentive …
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Slate's new international paywall seems ill-conceived
Even though I am a regular reader of Slate, I missed this announcement last month that they are putting in a metered paywall for International (i.e., non-US) readers. Like many other news sites, you can have, in this case, 5 free articles a month and for more will have to pay $5 a month for …
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Digitopoly 