| I think it can still cost a great deal to produce content , let's take video games as an example. GTA 4 cost approx $100 million to develop, even the much more modest "angry birds" cost around $100,000.
Even equipment for recording and editing music to a high standard doesn't come cheap and the amount I have seen professional video/photography people pay for cameras alone is staggering. This is not the kind of money most people have lying around, it has to come from somewhere. Distribution is cheaper for sure, but you still have to factor in costs for bandwidth so it's not quite free although you may get some mileage from using a P2P system for some of the distribution. You also (in the case of software at least) need some sort of support infrastructure in place for when people have problems with your product. This means contracting out to a call centre or at least hiring someone to answer the emails. I would hazard that many content companies spend quite a lot of money and time marketing their products which includes finding ways to pimp them on social media. If anything you have to do more to stand out now that there is so much noise, this means either spending more money or hiring smarter people to do your marketing (who probably want to get paid). There are projects like kickstarter which offer an alternative way to finance works, of course it's early days yet so we will have to see how that works out. The problem with "pay what you want" is that this is probably going to be as close to zero as you feel comfortable going. Even if you wanted to objectively try and pay a fair price , this will be affected by what you see other people paying. A case in point would be the ardour music production software which is one of the few free software projects to have a full time programmer working on it who was not an employee of some corporate entity. However when you look at the donations he has received I'm surprised he is able to feed himself, bear in mind that this is pro level software which is actively used by enthusiasts and some pros. I think it would be difficult to agree that he is paid
anything close to the value of what he produces. |