🔴 Information will never be free

Did you see Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s “delete all IP law” tweet the other day? Ever since I read it, I’ve been thinking about another popular phrase: “Information wants to be free.”

I make my living by sourcing, processing, and recontextualizing information. So do you, I assume, as a Spotlight reader. Information is never truly free; there’s always work involved. How should creators be compensated?

In this issue:

• 🧠 What did the first person to say “Information wants to be free” really mean?

• 🤖 Do we live in a “post-information economy”?

• 🤔 A guide to picking the best monetization model for your information product

— Francis Zierer, Editor

• Building an audience on LinkedIn? Monetizing a newsletter? Thinking about an acquisition? We get into all of it on this week’s podcast. (Creator Spotlight)

• Amazing, in-depth study of how the digital economy has grown since 2020. Guess how many more full-time creators there are today, then click. (IAB)

• Excellent piece on how the creator economy has matured, (especially re: affiliate marketing, influencing). Warning, paywalled. (Vogue Business)

• 30-second Reel with 5 visual hooks to try in your own videos (Instagram)

There’s no such thing as free information

Stop me if you’ve heard this before: information wants to be free. The most commonly credited source for this line is Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. The best source I could find is him saying this in conversation with Apple’s Steve Wozniak in 1984.

To his credit, Brand put an “almost” in there, but that “almost” tends to get dropped when I see this quote in the wild, as I so often do on X in particular. And he’s agreeing that information also “wants to be expensive.”

Brand tends to get credit for the quote, but he was riffing on an idea from the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy. When they used the word “information,” they were specifically talking about ideas for products and how large companies might kill their employee’s ideas rather than bringing them to market or letting those employees bring them to market on their own.

In that conversation with Steve Wozniak, somebody (maybe Woz) interjects:

I agree. So does art and tech critic Mike Pepi, who points out in his 2024 book Against Platforms, that “For information to be free, many other things would have to be free as well, namely housing, health care and food.”

Information is labor, and labor always has a cost

Creators deal in information. Media is information; video, audio, writing. It’s information all the way down. And none of it is free. Information is labor; it is always an exchange.

The idea that information wants to be free also bothers me. I’ve certainly been known to overuse metaphor and personification of inanimate objects and ideas, including in any given issue of this newsletter, but let’s be clear: information cannot want.

One caveat: even if information can’t “want,” since it’s not living and breathing in a literal sense, people can want free information. Consumers want free information! Remember Napster? You wouldn’t download a car … unless?

But there is no such thing as “free information.” All information is the product of labor; I see a car speeding up the street, and because I have my sight and hearing, I encode this information, process it, and wait to cross the street. This is only on the most basic level; it only costs me a fraction of a calorie: gathering, encoding, or exchanging information can cost entire lives. A life devoted to the study of disease, a spy poisoned in retaliation for leaking information to an enemy in war.

So let’s update the phrase: Consumers want information to be free, and businesses want attention to be free.

Consumers need attention to inform their actions, and producers need attention to process into revenue, whether directly or indirectly.

Who benefits from the exchange of information, free or otherwise?

The exchange of information can benefit at least four parties:

1. The producer: The party who originally processed and encoded the information into a transmittable form

2. The provider: The party marketing the information. Sometimes, this is the same as the producer; sometimes, it’s not. A link aggregation newsletter, for example, is more of a provider than a producer in this equation.

3. The medium of exchange: In the context of the internet, this means platforms and their owners.

4. The consumer: The party receiving the information, who may then use it to inform their actions.

Inconceivably vast oceans of information flood the internet.

The phrase “information wants to be free” implies a sort of gravity. If information wants to be free, it flows towards freedom like water downhill, into rivers and oceans of information, growing polluted along the way as it’s picked up, used, abused, and redistributed.

Information — especially “potable” information that bears minimal pollution or distortion, that has been bottled at the source, so to speak, absolutely has market value; absolutely is not “free.”

Let’s address the elephant in the room: so much information is free in a practical sense. You can go Google any question or type any question into ChatGPT and get pretty much any answer there has ever been for that question. (Still not “free," since you had to pay for the internet access, Google has to pay employees and servers, etc. — many layers of cost.)

And you’ll find no shortage of great, high-quality information! You’ll also find plenty of low-quality information, non-potable information that’s been processed and re-processed enough times, in who-knows-how-many games of “telephone,” to the point that it’s lost crucial context and meaning. For example, “Information wants to be free” — Brand never said that! He said it “almost” wants to be free and “wants to be expensive.”

His actual point was more that there’s a tension between consumers of information wanting to access it freely and producers or distributors of information wanting to monetize it.

“The post-information economy”

Earlier this week I recorded a conversation with Colin Rocker, a creator whose content is focused on career advice for what he’s termed “first-generation professionals.” None of the advice he shares is new. You could find it on your own with one Google search. Colin is not bottling information at the source; he works more like a bottled water producer, pulling information out of the vast lakes, processing it to potability, and packing it for his specific audience.

To be clear, Colin’s manner of presentation is the new information. His charisma, the way his videos are shot, the fact that it’s clear he’s in New York City, and how he looks are all information telling the viewer that this is potable information. You can safely consume it.

Three models of monetized information exchange creators can adopt

Let me restate: consumers want information to be free, and businesses want attention to be free. Creators monetize either by acting as a third party between the two or playing the business role themselves. Below are a few ways to understand how creators monetize. These are not necessarily distinct categories! There’s overlap. Plenty of creators combine all three.

• Advertising

  • Information is “free”; advertiser pays for it with money, and consumer pays for it with attention

• Subscription

  • Information is not “free”; consumer pays for it with money

• Marketing funnel for other products

  • Information is “free”; consumers pay for products that pay for it; this is just another form of advertising

More practically, here are a few ways these models can be implemented:

This is not meant as an exhaustive list of monetization models, but these are three of the most common and easiest to implement.

• Primary-sourced information:

  • Easiest to monetize with paid subscriptions. You have a unique, non-commodity product. You are the source of information or accessing experts that other people cannot.

  • Case studies from past Creator Spotlight guests: Matt Brown, Rachel Karten, Ambreen Ali

• Curated information:

  • Easiest to monetize with advertising. Taste-as-a-service. You understand how to make sense of pieces of information together and make selections from the vast, polluted information ocean.

  • Case studies from past Creator Spotlight guests: Kate Samuelson, Michael Kauffman, Casey Lewis (free daily newsletter)

• Instructively processed information:

  • Easiest to monetize as a marketing funnel for other products. You’re selling your ability to understand, synthesize, and explain complex information. Also known as educational content.

  • Case studies from past Creator Spotlight guests: Matt McGarry, Kyle Sheldon, Casey Lewis (paid weekly newsletter)

We made a scorecard for you to judge how best to monetize your own information products. Please note other factors also apply: who your audience is and what they want, for example, are paramount in such an assessment.

Free lunch!

It’s very easy to free information that’s not intended to be free by the person who originally encoded it or any one of its distributors. Let them who’ve never torrented a file cast the first stone.

While preparing for my interview with Matt Brown earlier this year, I came across a Reddit post (he’s a prolific Redditor) where an anonymous user had reposted paywalled content from Matt’s newsletter, Extra Points, for all to see. By the time I found it, the images had long been deleted, but the comment section on the post was packed with people shaming the original poster.

Top comment: “Damn this is one of the shittiest behaviors I've ever seen, OP.” People appreciate that information is labor and are willing to pay for it; the game is to provide information worth paying for. The people who source and share high-quality information should always be rewarded more than the people and organizations who own the site of exchange; this is one reason I find newsletters so appealing.

I’d like to wrap this all up in a phrase as exciting and glamorous as “Information wants to be free,” but I don’t see one. The closest I can get: people should be compensated for labor. Creators are entrepreneurs without many traditional labor protections; it’s on you to ensure you have a quality compensation structure and on consumers to contribute to a healthy information ecosystem.

Have something to say about this essay? Disagree with a point?

Let’s discuss in the comments.

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