Reducing piracy

InternetNZ CEO Vikram Kumar has a good blog post on how you can make money from zero priced products. He notes:

Accepting some people won’t pay doesn’t mean they can’t make money. Instead, they need to come up with innovative answers to the question, “How do we give people what, when, and how they want our products at a zero price?”

The answers are there but it takes effort, attention, and good ideas. Let’s take an example from another industry, the software industry.

Zero cost software

How do you make money from software without charging anything for it? It’s not simple but several models exist. For example, there’s the upgrade or “freemium” model (charge for extra features or functionality); the services model (charge for allied services, e.g. design or support or tools); the donation or funded model (customer pays what they can or want to, before or after the software is developed); the loss-leader model (gain popularity to sell other software); the advertising model (money made from advertisers); etc.

How can this be applied? Just ask Justin Bieber how he got his break. Or, read this great article in The Guardian about Gorillaz as well as the one in GigaOM where author Neil Gaiman talks about how he is selling more books in countries where his books are pirated.

The traditional business model of Hollywood is based on the 1970s, not the 2010s. It will take time, but eventually they will change.