I’ve been waiting until I had time to do an in-depth review of Free but I’m seeing that that time isn’t going to happen. So I’ll keep bloggin in bits on it. Two things I wanted to highlight.

1. An interesting experiment in which researchers sold two kinds of treats. Deluxe chocolates for 15 cents and Hershey’s Kisses for 1 cent. 73% of consumers chose the deluxe chocolates, which were priced at about half their wholesale cost. Then they sold deluxe chocolates for 14 cents and Hershey’s kisses for free. Same price differential, but now 69% of folks chose the Kiss.

This illustration shows the power of “free.” Free is not just another price, it’s a radical price — there’s free, and then there’s everything else Anderson says. Free takes away the question of “should I pull out my wallet” and makes a “purchasing” decision much easier.

2. I was intriged by an account by Derek Webb. He had a record he likes, but it wasn’t selling. So he started giving away copies, but he would also collect email addresses, zipcodes and asked people to email five friends to let them know about the CD (he did not collect the email addresses). So he gave away 80,000 copies of the album and filtered his list by zipcodes to find out where “fans” were who might be interested in a concert. He sells out shows and sells a lot of merchandise.

To me that seemed like a very clever way to take “free” and make money on it.