# Free  Author:: Chris Anderson ## AI-Generated Summary None ## Highlights > Therein lies the paradox of Free: People are making lots of money charging nothing. Not nothing for everything, but nothing for enough that we have essentially created an economy as big as a good-sized country around the price of $0.00. ([Location 132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DYJR4G&location=132)) > Not nothing for everything, but nothing for enough that we have essentially created an economy as big as a good-sized country around the price of $0.00. ([Location 132](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DYJR4G&location=132)) > today’s free is full of apparent contradictions: You can make money giving things away. There really is A free lunch. Sometimes you get more than you pay for. ([Location 156](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DYJR4G&location=156)) > They couldn’t afford to give out free samples of the product itself, so they did the next best thing: free information that could only be used if the consumer bought the product. ([Location 224](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DYJR4G&location=224)) > Thus was born one of the most powerful marketing tools of the twentieth century: giving away one thing to create demand for another. ([Location 232](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DYJR4G&location=232)) > He also figured out that “free” didn’t mean profitless. It just meant that the route from product to revenue was indirect, something that would become enshrined in the retail playbook as the concept of a “loss leader.” ([Location 235](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DYJR4G&location=235)) > Instead, it’s driven by an extraordinary new ability to lower the costs of goods and services close to zero. ([Location 267](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DYJR4G&location=267)) > This new form of free is based on the economics of bits, not atoms. It is a unique quality of the digital age that once something becomes software, it inevitably becomes free—in cost, certainly, and often in price. ([Location 268](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DYJR4G&location=268)) > The atoms economy is inflationary, while the bits economy is deflationary. ([Location 274](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DYJR4G&location=274)) > shifting money around from product to product, person to person, between now and later, or into nonmonetary markets and back out again. Economists call these “cross-subsidies.” ([Location 361](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B002DYJR4G&location=361))