Chris Anderson, the author of the influential bestseller ‘The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More’
, about niche strategies of big companies like Amazon and Netflix, published a new book: “FREE – The Future of a Radical Price”. And you can get the 6 hour audiobook for FREE in the iTunes store!
You can download the audiobook for free via this link (goes to the US iTunes store, check your local iTunes store to see if it’s available there as well).
The Long Tail
‘The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More’ was very influential on my understanding of podcasting as an ideal way of evangelizing via new media productions like podcasts, online video and blogs.
The concept of the book is simple: to gather a big audience in the past, you needed to have a ‘bestseller’, a hit series like ‘Lost
‘ or a book like the ‘Catechism of the Catholic Church
‘. It was too expensive for stores to keep stock of books that only generated small sales, or to air TV series that didn’t get picked up right away by a large audience (Firefly
anyone?).
However, thanks to digital distribution and online stores, publications and media productions with a limited immediate appeal can still gather a substantial audience over time, it just takes longer. So a couple of ‘bestsellers’ might cause a spike in sales during a short period of time, but in today’s internet economy, there is also a ‘long tail’ of products that are generating sales or gathering an audience over a longer period of time. The only thing you need as a distributor is a large warehouse (Amazon), or a very big hard drive in case you are in the digital business.
Harry Potter
Take for instance the SQPN podcast series about the religious and Catholic themes used by JK Rowling in her famous Harry Potter Saga
. A new episode of ‘The Secrets of Harry Potter’ might get 5,000 downloads in the first week after publication. But after two months, the number of downloads might have grown to 50,000!
And since new listeners discover the series on a daily basis, and can download older episodes as well, some shows have now been downloaded more than 150,000 times. Not bad considering that it only took an hour to produce such an episode.
Mustard Seed
That is why the Catholic Church should invest much more into digital productions like podcasts – a one time investment can touch hundreds of thousands of people over time. SQPN has received countless emails from people who returned to the Church or converted thanks to the big catalogue of Catholic podcasts produced by the network.
The image of the mustard seed could be the biblical equivalent of Anderson’s ‘long tail’: SQPN’s new media evangelization effort starts small, almost insignificant, but over time, it grows and shelters many souls.
For profit or For Free?
There is an ongoing debate among Catholics that are active in new media about how to turn these activities into ’sustainable models’. How can you make sure that you can organize new media evangelization in a way that guarantees its survival – how do you fund it? I see two paths:
The first path is that of creating for-profit organizations that will provide Catholic new media products for a fee. The model is similar to that of traditional Catholic publishers: you guarantee quality products and customers will have to pay a price.
The second path is to go the non-profit route, essentially giving away your media products for free; generating income through voluntary donations or via sponsorship. It is the path that SQPN has taken right from the start.
Both models coexist, and they each have advantages and disadvantages.
The for-profit model could provide a more solid basis for development and growth. But it could also create a barrier for not-yet-Catholics: why would you pay for a Catholic product when you aren’t a Catholic? And even existing Catholics might hesitate to pay for digital media when the economy is tight, and so much content can be found for free on the internet.
The non-profit model completely removes the threshold for anyone who is curious and wants to sample what is offered. SQPN would be rich if we would have received $1 for every podcast episode that was downloaded in the past 5 years, but with that price tag, we would have never reached the large audience that we have! The downside is that there is less of a guarantee that you will have funding in the future, since you completely abandon yourself to the generosity of your audience.
Chris Anderson’s new book makes a case that, in many instances, organizations and businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them. I can’t wait to listen to this audiobook, and I will soon post more thoughts about it on this blog. In the mean time, share your thoughts in the comments below!
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