Many vendors give away free services, but usually there is a catch. For example, while Google has given away search services for more than a decade, no user has any illusions as to why. Advertising buys space and tries to reach readers. As another example, for many years US cellular carriers came close to giving …
Subscription models for eBooks
One of the things that I propose in Information Wants to be Shared is a move away from a 'book ownership' model and towards a 'book access' model. Basically, that the library model is the natural state for books as opposed to what we have had in book publishing for the last couple of centuries. …
Barnes and Noble tries a sharing approach
News today: Between December 20 and 24, customers who go to a Barnes & Noble physical store and buy an ebook from a list of 20 qualifying ebooks — including The Hobbit, Life of Pi and the entire Hunger Games trilogy – can “instant-gift” another ebook on that list for free. Notably, the list includes new and bestselling titles from big-six publishers …
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Online education experiments at the margin
[This post was originally published at Forbes.com on 1st October 2012] Psst, you want to know what academics talk about these days? Not research. Not annoying students. Not even exceptional students. No, they talk about online education. And for economists like myself, they talk about it a lot. The reason is that we economist academics …
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A shared pricing experiment for my book
My new book, Information Wants to be Shared, is now officially out. I'll follow up a little later with more details regarding what it is about but if you have been a regular reader of this blog, some of the themes will be familiar. Back in December I realised that there was a common thread …
Black swans and judging entrepreneurial ventures
The ever interesting Paul Graham of Y-Cominbator published another essay yesterday entitles, "Black Swan Farming." No, it isn't about a possible Western Australian agricultural opportunity. Instead, it covers this: The two most important things to understand about startup investing, as a business, are (1) that effectively all the returns are concentrated in a few big …
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My two cents on the golden balls
Since everyone is talking about it, here is my two cents on the above 'Golden Balls' video. Let's suppose that the guy on the left is choosing column and the guy on the right is choosing row. (The first payoff in each cell in the following game is the right guy's payoff). Here is the …
Newspapers are completely out at sea
The Pew Research Center released a new report today that brings together survey and other data on the plight of the newspapers. The data underlying it looks interesting. Sadly, the summary is more casual. Nonetheless, it largely confirms what we already knew: digital ad revenue is not making up for the decline in traditional ad …
Online class participation
As any MBA teacher will tell you, classroom participation is great for learning but incredibly hard to assess. Keeping track of activity let alone the quality of contributions in a transparent manner is very difficult. For my new Network and Digital Market Strategy course at Rotman (both MBA and undergrad), I decided to 'go virtual' …
Digitopoly 