There’s been a lot of talk in the last couple of years about “free as a business model”—the idea put forth by Chris Anderson in a 2008 Wired magazine cover story that you can build a successful business around a product or service that you give away for free. Bill Gurley presents a nice overview of the development of the idea. One of my favorite books about the Internet economy is What Would Google Do?, in which Jeff Jarvis talks about how Google has exploited the power of free services to make piles of money.

Yesterday I went looking for an image to illustrate a blog post, and I stumbled across an exciting application of “free as a business model” at FreeDigitalPhotos.net. This stock photography site offers web-resolution versions of all of its images for free on one condition: the user must acknowledge the photographer and FreeDigitalPhotos.net …[more]