Friction
Seth Godin had a post asking whether Craigslist should charge $1 for posted ads and how that might impact the service. We know what Chris Anderson would say. He’d say that “information wants to be free” and that that level of friction might destroy the service. Gladwell would counter that information doesn’t want anything. It’s not a person.
And the bottom line would be, as Fred has pointed out in the past, that there shouldn’t be a philosophical approach to these ideas but a practical one. And if there are businesses that can get away with charging something for content that others give away for free then have at it. We should rigorously experiment with whatever works, dispensing with any kind of dogma about what “information” wants and instead focus on what kinds of businesses we can build and what kinds of value we can deliver to our customer or, er, um, fans.
This appears to be a central question underpinning the Web.
What is the level of friction that we can introduce and how does that level of friction differentiate between people that actually value something and people that don’t?
I remember a few years ago Best Buy began a campaign to actively stop selling to customers that showed up high on their perpetual return list. People that would always buy things and return them for some credit after having used them. So Best Buy took the controversial stance that, actually, certain customers weren’t always right, and they wanted to build their business around their most profitable customers.
So swapping “customers” for “fans”, there’s any easy correlation to the music world. And the mind wanders back to the right levels of friction to try and separate people that aren’t truly fans and don’t truly care about the music or the art or the brand or whatever it is and those that do. Those that seem genuinely engaged. And those that are willing to share something of themselves in order to participate. I’m speaking mostly, of course, of money. But also of things like an email address or a cell phone number or their attention or even a willingness to open an email or most prized of all the willingness to attend a live performance.
And the question remains, “How best to separate these separate strands of attention?” Separate out the people that are casually interested, and maybe preserve something for the people that are more than casually interested. And then the irony is that the people that care the most are the people that are most likely to spread the word about the music and yet those are the same people that we’re talking about charging.
Right now, I have a few layers of friction in place. One of them is the email signup splash page. That seems to be working, at least on a low level, getting a few people here and there a week that seem to be interested in hearing more. And for people that are already fans and aware of thes ite, they’re probably following on Twitter and/or going straight to pages within the body of the site. And then, of course, there are things that people on the mailing list find out about that are not readily available to people that are just stumbling upon the music or the site from other places. And then there is the free album download page that, while not technically hidden, requires some level of interaction to find.
Of course, none of these layers of friction ask for money, per se. The most I’m asking for right now is simply an email address. But it’s been interesting to think about and to think about how to potentially extend those layers of friction to see if there’s one day a way to make some money.
I wonder what would happen if I charged $5 to enter the site and that $5 was a subscription for a year. I wonder what would happen. Most likely I’d make $50 and then the posts would be closed off from the world and my influence would be greatly diminished (ed note: yes, greatly diminished. you are so influential. we shouldn’t mess with that). But I still come back to an annual subscription model for musicians that has interested fans paying $100 a year and getting everything that happens. Every piece of music. Every show. Every concert.
Most people would say, “You’ll turn too many people off” or “Nobody will pay that”. But maybe the truth is that only a few people would pay and that’s the reality of your band at that moment but those few people are the people you should’ve been talking to the entire time anyway.
