More than you pay for

“You get what you pay for.”

It’s such a common phrase that we tend to believe it, and the adage still holds true from time to time. If your $500 car breaks down, well, you get what you pay for. If you buy and drink Keystone Light, well, you get what you pay for. According to such folk wisdom, if you want quality, you need to pay for it.

Until now. Thanks almost entirely to the almighty Internet, while our ancestors had the Bronze Age or the Iron Age, we have arrived in the great Free Stuff Age, and it is addicting.

The Internet has revolutionized everything, from the way we work to the way we play. Still, arguably the most radical, enjoyable aspect is that so much of the Internet is free. Music, media and information are free and/or unlimited, even legally. Downloading may be verboten, but in a world where the impressive wealth of sites like Pandora, Hulu, Wikipedia and Google News are shared freely, actively paying to be informed or entertained is rapidly becoming a relic of the past.

This culture of free stuff is so addicting that it is becoming increasingly painful when we do have to fork over money for something physical, like a DVD or a newspaper, especially knowing that the same content is available online for free.

Not everyone has realized this steady shift in the consumer’s worldview, however, especially the long-suffering newspaper industry. As a case in point, last week, media titan Rupert Murdoch unveiled The Daily: a digital “newspaper” delivered to the iPad every morning for $0.99 a week or $39.99 a year.

The Daily clearly seeks to be a way for the industry to give the people what they want and thus reclaim an audience lost largely to the Internet . Indeed, The Daily obviously models itself on online news sources, with 360-degree viewable pictures and videos embedded within the text stories.

However, the developers are missing the most important feature: The Internet is free. Less than a dollar a week is not much (especially considering the fact that iPad owners have already dropped at least $500 on their device). Nevertheless, even some small thing is something, and many free iPad apps (from sources like CNN and the New York Times) are comparable, and more importantly, free.

If a consumer does not have to pay for something, he or she simply won’t. We like things fast, shiny and clickable, this is true, but more than anything else we love the feeling that we have either outsmarted the system or been given a gift, neither of which requires a credit card.


E-mail: mebinder@indiana.edu