Qué difícil es ser libre

Las vacaciones son muy cortas para que las cosas cambien. Los medios chilenos están envueltos en sus propias escalas de valores y a pesar de abrir sus espacios a la opinión de la "audiencia" (tardíamente) lo que realmente les cuesta es metalizarse que los conceptos han cambiado. Esto no necesariamente significa el fin del negocio. Pero si TVN sube sus programas históricos con una barrera para ser reproducidos en otros medios, es que aún no se empapa de la segunda revolución de internet y que es mucho más que la hiperusada web 2.0. Bastaría con saber que el 60% de las descargas de Youtube se hacen desde otros sitios. Y son más de 60 millones de descargas. Wired no es la única revista que ha adelantado que los contenidos y aplicaciones libres de costo serán, por el momento, el concepto que imperará en la red. Este dominio alcanza niveles apasionantes y son una gran oportunidad para los medios, que manejan volúmenes de contenidos impresionantes. En especial, cuando ya sabemos que el periodismo ciudadano es un fiasco. El siguiente artículo es de Chris Anderson, un preámbulo de sus teorías y de su próximo libro.

Por Chris Anderson
artículo Wired

At the age of 40, King Gillette was a frustrated inventor, a bitter anticapitalist, and a salesman of cork-lined bottle caps. It was 1895, and despite ideas, energy, and wealthy parents, he had little to show for his work. He blamed the evils of market competition. Indeed, the previous year he had published a book, The Human Drift, which argued that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public and that millions of Americans should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. His boss at the bottle cap company, meanwhile, had just one piece of advice: Invent something people use and throw away.

One day, while he was shaving with a straight razor that was so worn it could no longer be sharpened, the idea came to him. What if the blade could be made of a thin metal strip? Rather than spending time maintaining the blades, men could simply discard them when they became dull. A few years of metallurgy experimentation later, the disposable-blade safety razor was born. But it didn't take off immediately. In its first year, 1903, Gillette sold a total of 51 razors and 168 blades. Over the next two decades, he tried every marketing gimmick he could think of. He put his own face on the package, making him both legendary and, some people believed, fictional. He sold millions of razors to the Army at a steep discount, hoping the habits soldiers developed at war would carry over to peacetime. He sold razors in bulk to banks so they could give them away with new deposits ("shave and save" campaigns). Razors were bundled with everything from Wrigley's gum to packets of coffee, tea, spices, and marshmallows. The freebies helped to sell those products, but the tactic helped Gillette even more. By giving away the razors, which were useless by themselves, he was creating demand for disposable blades. A few billion blades later, this business model is now the foundation of entire industries: Give away the cell phone, sell the monthly plan; make the videogame console cheap and sell expensive games; install fancy coffeemakers in offices at no charge so you can sell managers expensive coffee sachets.