Sunday, September 25, 2016

When "you get what you pay for" no longer applies

Ah, the Internet. It brings us hotel reviews, deals on shoes, too many pictures of people's kids and renovations, and so much more...hence the 2 word catch-all Because Internet as a glib attempt to explain away the oddities of the vast network's offerings, and the often strange behaviours we all contribute to the mix.

The many splendored thing that is the Internet has rewritten the rules of many businesses, or, more accurately, those rules are in the process of being rewritten.

The conventional economic thinking of people operating in self interest, and therefore not working for free has been upended by the likes of Wikipedia and The Huffington Post.

The laws of supply and demand have similarly been suspended. Generally it works like this: demand goes down, supply co-operates with gravity and also goes down. Not always so on the Internet, with, for example, the output of the creative industries such as music, writing, and photography, being prime examples.  Fewer people pay, more people produce. What would Adam "Wealth of Nations" Smith have to say about this?  We'll never know.  

Conventional wisdom says we get what we pay for.  But on the Internet we also get what we don't pay for, a topic explored further in the Up Next Podcast on which I was recently a guest.  

Or perhaps as an old friend from my campus radio days put it: