I’ve read an interesting article at ReadWriteWeb about free content and giving away for free. I’ll start by saying I’m for the free content, and not against it.

It seems that more and more people are against free, and against giving away for free. This whole “for free” trend was probably started by Google. They had the search engine, they had the user-base, then they figured out they could display adds into the search results. And they were paid to do it. So they started displaying ads into mail listings also. Even though some argue that this is not good, I’d say it’s the key to the web evolution, and the key to our evolution: programmers, engineers, doctors, scientists, writers, and so on, can find a lot of useful information quickly and free. This was not possible 10 years ago, and it wouldn’t be useful today if the service was not free. Few people would use such a service if they had to pay for it. So you can’t argue that (at least) this free service helps our society evolve.

Why are we so afraid of receiving for free? Ok, we actually don’t get anything for free, we see the ads (more like ignore them, but that’s a different story) and for that we can use search, mail, access information all over the web. But guess what? We don’t care. I don’t mind that I see ads on the search results as long as I find what I want. And I don’t mind seeing adds next to my emails, as long as I have a 6GB storage in my Inbox.

Instead of being afraid of free, why don’t we adapt to free? Why don’t we work on changing the way we do business in order to stay competitive? Yeah, it’s easier to blame others when we feel losing ground, but instead we should adapt our business. This is one of the oldest rules of doing business, not just in the web, but everywhere.

I’m for free and because of these free services the advertising became what it is today. Because others give away for free we have to thing of better and more useful services just to stay competitive. And I wouldn’t mind getting free books either.