Web Work in the Era of Free

Wired editor Chris Anderson has just published some interesting ruminations on costs on the Internet. Titled Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business, the essay discusses the rapidly falling marginal cost of internet services (with bandwidth, storage, and processing power all getting so close to free on a per-customer basis to no longer matter as costs) and the effects that this is starting to have, both on our expectations and on business models.

While Anderson does identify half a dozen viable business models for organizations in the free era (including freemium services, advertising, cross-subsidies, zero marginal cost, labor exchange, and the gift economy), our focus here is a bit different. As web workers, we still need to earn money one way or another, if only to pay for groceries and new laptops. What does the era of free mean for us?

First off, if you’re directly trying to sell something that other people are giving away, you need to stop and find something else to do. If you were planning to charge people for online storage or email delivery, give up now. That’s not to say that there are no viable business models there, but you’d be competing with very large players who can undercut your pricing to the bone. Even as a software consultant, it’s time to point your customers at things like GMail and Box.net, rather than wasting your time and your customer’s money implementing similar capabilities in-house.

Second, if you expect people to pay you, you need to be charging for something that they can’t get for free. Further, if you’re living in a first world economy, you also need to move away from things that your customers can buy for prices that might as well be free. With the spread of Elance, RentACoder, and similar sites, the pool of “might as well be free” tasks is growing ever larger: it now includes most anything that a virtual assistant can do, as well as increasingly things like web site design and programming. Unless $12 an hour is an attractive rate for you, it’s time to bail out of such commodity activities.

Enough for the “what not to do” advice: knowing what to skip will keep you from barking up the wrong tree, but it’s not a recipe for actually being able to afford food. As a web worker, you need to think hard about what skills you can sell that can’t be easily commoditized. This means focusing on areas where you can add more value in less time than your vast worldwide competitor pool. Typically, this means emphasizing qualities like these about your work:

  • Timeliness: What do you know right now that most others have not yet caught up with? If you’ve had the opportunity to learn a brand-new framework or design technique that works with the most modern browsers, you can set yourself apart from the herd by seeking work in that particular area.
  • Expertise: If you can’t sell what you do that’s unique, concentrate on what you do that’s better. Sites where the client swooned over your CSS mean you’re not just another CSS hacker. Translation from English to French coupled with an extensive bilingual medical vocabulary means you’re not just another translator.
  • Reputation: If you have a consistent track record of delivering on time, under budget, and making customers happy – that’s a feature in and of itself. Happy customers are a resource to be cultivated and reused for testimonials and references (or mined for referrals). Again, the goal is to prove that you’re not just any web worker, but a particularly valuable one.
  • Initiative: If you keep up with the latest industry developments, and can point out to your customers how to save money or add features without spending more, you can sell this sort of high-level thinking. The teleworking drone won’t get paid any better than any other drone; the valuable team member can stand out and command higher rates.

At its base, surviving – and thriving – as a web worker in the era of free requires two simple things. First, you need to identify the areas where you are not easily replaceable by free resources. Second, you need to publicize those areas. But this requires some actual thought, and the ability to change with the times. Fortunately, most web workers can handle that.

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