What’s Actually Worth Paying For Anymore?

By Neal 

“When copies are free, you need to sell things which can not be copied,” Kevin Kelly recently observed, which begs the question of what’s left that remains unreproducible in the internet-enabled economy. Put a better way: “When anyone buys a version of something they could get for free, what are they purchasing?” Which is something many in publishing have been mulling over for some time, with everybody else soon to follow if they know what’s good for them.

Kelly points to eight “generatives” that turn an easily replicated product into something of unreplicable value to its users, many of which you’ll recognize: immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage, and findability. If you noticed that most of those properties address how users relate to products rather than to the products themselves, good catch: “The money in this networked economy does not follow the path of the copies,” Kelly observes. “Rather it follows the path of attention, and attention has its own circuits.”