But even that's not quite right. After all, what is a Google search if not a unique and customized sort of the Web, tailored just for you to be a meaningful response to your query? So let's try again:
Abundant information wants to be free. Scarce information wants to be expensive.
In this case, we're using the marginal cost construction of "abundant" and "scarce:" Information that can be replicated and distributed at low marginal cost wants to be free; information with high marginal costs wants to be expensive."
The concept of "free" shoots a big hole in the "all eggs in one basket" paradigm for news, because it suggests a new role in the dissemination of news content — a vehicle to move people to other, more monetizeable forms of media, including advertising. But Anderson is not speaking of the "tease" strategy employed by contemporary media online. "Free" as a tease is not really free, so we're talking about a new form of free information.
So let's assume that a free form of news is strategically smart to use as a marketing tool for forms of news delivered from our monetiziable stages. This frees our minds to think differently about that browser window, for rather than seeking to build our service around revenue, we can now build a service that is largely promotional, and we can target that service to individuals, based on behavior or preselected interests. This also means we don't care where or how this service is consumed, because its value proposition to us is not as a direct revenue-generator. We can freely unbundle (as in RSS 2.0, full feeds) this kind of content, because its purpose is other than the "all eggs in one basket" approach.
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