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It’s not a prediction; it’s not a prophecy. It’s simply taxonomy to explain what’s already happened.

Q: So you are very much describing the world as it is, not as it should be. Do you feel that some people will read it otherwise?
A: Absolutely. This is one of the curses of being editor of Wired. We’re a revolutionary magazine. There’s a lot of the world as it should be in there, especially in its early years it was very evangelical and part of me is drawn to that. There’s a lot of flag waving and revolutionary rhetoric in our pages today. People will project that on everything I do. I probably can’t divorce entirely. It’s probably true that there is some tone in the book that feels as if I’m advocating free rather than explaining it, but I’ve endeavoured not to make it a manifesto.

Q: There were people who perhaps followed The Long Tail as a manifesto rather than as an explanation.
A: I really don’t want to be an evangelist. I don’t want to be leading a parade. I’d really much rather explain a parade that’s already happening. But, I live in Berkeley, California, it's in the water. My great grandfather co-founded the American anarchist movement. It’s in my DNA. I was in punk rock bands in my 20s. I have it hardwired in my system and it seeps out in my writing even when I try to stop it.

Q: So, let’s come back to what you would evangelise about later. There are certain points in Free where I read it as if you got near to certain conclusions and then pulled away from them.
A: That’s probably true, give me some examples

Q: The future of newspapers. You got very close to saying we’re doomed, but you didn’t say it. Are we doomed?
A: This question is going to be the curse of my next year.

Q: Because everyone who interviews you has a vested interest?
A: Exactly. The reason I didn’t finish that sentence, finish that thought, is because I don’t have any answers. I’m in the media business too. Life has been good to us for the last half-century. We had a monopoly on consumer attention, we had the tools of production, and we had printing presses and truck fleets and newsstands. We extracted quasi-monopoly rents in return. We, meaning the media industry in general.

The problem is not that people don’t want what we do, it’s that there is now infinite competition. We had a scarcity business model, and we’re now in an abundant world. Economics will tell you, you can only make money from scarcity. There’s abundant information, but it’s not all the same quality. Presumably if we’re good at what we do, we’ll earn our share of attention. Rather than by getting attention by default because we own the monopoly access on distribution, we’ll have to earn it.

We might not make as much money as we did before, and our cost structures will have to change. I don’t have any answers for newspapers. Let me just talk about magazines. What we do is not dependent on paper. It’s dependent on a rich visual medium. If you can invent me a tablet that gives me all the impact of paper, then I will stop killing trees tomorrow.

Q: Not the Kindle yet?
A: It’s black and white, and the wrong size. It’s getting there. I can imagine it happening in the next decade.

Q: It’s not just newspapers is it? Take the music industry. You come closer to spelling out where it’s going to go.
A: Music’s already there. We don’t have to guess about what the future of music is; we can already see it. It’s interesting as an analogy. We wrongly correlated, or equated, the music industry with the record labels. It now turns out in fact that the labels are now the least important part. If you look at the rest of the industry now, from the bands to the fans from Apple to tour promoters, everyone’s doing OK, except for the labels. So there’s really nothing wrong with the music industry; we’re just redefining what it is. And I wonder whether we’re going to see a similar fragmentation and reformation of media. Right now, media is defined as those who own the presses – the presses meaning either the physical presses or broadcast towers or whatever. We’re beginning to see a new class of professional media which operate on internet economics. They’re still small, and they don’t make anything like the money.

At Wired the magazine we have the magazine and we have wired.com. Wired the magazine has about 2 million readers a month, and wired.com has about 12 million readers a month. The magazine has revenues that are about four times as much as wired.com, so we haven’t figured out how to get equivalent revenues from equivalent attention online. I wouldn’t be surprised if we found a way to get online advertising rates up. And I wouldn’t be surprised if print advertising rates go down.

Q: I don’t think anyone would be surprised if print advertising rates went down. But I think everyone’s beginning to think that actually online advertising rates are never going to go up. If they don’t go up, what then?
A: If the online ads don’t fill the gap, then the model is more broken than we think. I think it’s too early to say. A little bit of historical trivia. Wired invented the banner ad, in my very office, before my time. You know how television was just radio with pictures, the banner ad was just a print ad in digital form That was the only kind of ad for a long time. Then Google invented the targeted text ad; it was measurable, and you pay per click not per view, and that became incredibly profitable for Google and not really very profitable for everyone else and tended to undermine the banner ad without distributing the profits elsewhere. Now we’re trying to invent the next ad model online that actually works. Maybe it will be video, maybe interactive, maybe another form of text; we don’t know.

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