That's the promise of digital content, right?
Facebook: more than 5 billion pieces of information shared each week.
Flickr: 3 million new photos and videos posted each day.
YouTube: 20 hours of new video uploaded every minute.
When it comes to business, however, I'm surprised by the willingness of some to give away data. Slideshare is a great source for presentation content, with more than 30,000 new documents uploaded each week. Companies and individuals eager to secure thought-leadership give away huge quantities of content. Not surprisingly, firms capable of charging premiums for information and insights (e.g., BCG, Prophet, McKinsey, etc.) do not follow this trend down.
As Stewart Brand first stated more than 25 years ago,
"Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine - too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless, wrenching debate about price, copyright, 'intellectual property,' (and) the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better."
I don't believe digital is such an indomitable force that it has to degrade or destroy the economic value of all content delivered digitally. Cost ratios for distribution may be one thing; the value of information is another.