If there is one constant in our online world it is the whining and moaning from old media, and to a growing extent new media, about how they are losing money because consumers don’t want to pay the same price for electronic versions of goods as they do for the actual in-hand physical version.
In fact there is a post currently on Fast Company titled Internet Users Still Cheap, Spend Only $1 to $10 on Digital Content , and while it might be a great pageview grabbing headline I find it rather insulting. In the post Austin Carr writes:
The digital marketplace is the likely savior of most industries. That is, if consumers are willing to spend money on the web. Do we expect too much for free online?
Sorry but it’s not just a matter of wanting everything for free, even though that is still a driving factor, but rather, I believe, that the consumer understands a very fundamental difference between online electronic versions of physical goods and the goods themselves – it’s availability.
You see when you walk into a store to buy a product you can see that there are only so many of copies of the item that is available. Whether it be a movie DVD, a game, a book or any item that is inherently available in electronic form, the price of a physical version is based on the cost of actually manufacturing those physical copies and making them available.
Yet when you go to buy that online in its pure electronic form those incurred costs change, and change radically. The consumer almost instinctively gets this and that is something that content producers continually try to ignore. The reality is that online electronic goods shouldn’t cost the same, or in some cases more than their brick and mortar equivalents.
Online consumers aren’t cheap. If they were businesses like Amazon or even the many t-shirt businesses would be able to stay in business. The consumer is smart enough to know that a physical product, whether it be a t-shirt, or a book, or even a physical copy of a movie or music album, has a cost to produce and are more than willing to pay those prices.
So when a consumer turns around and says that they don’t want to pay physical goods prices for the electronic versions they aren’t being cheap and to suggest otherwise is insulting their intelligence. They are however more than willing to pay what they consider to be a fair price as long as you make it easy for them.
