The debate about media revenue models is certainly creating revenue for some content – the thoughts of pop culture theorists

If you want to deepen your confusion over the future revenue models for media content, then look no further than the staging of the paradoxical debate between pop culture theorists Chris Anderson and Malcolm Gladwell.

Gladwell’s review, commissioned and published in a magazine you have to buy, is freely available online. Its subject, Anderson’s book Free: The Future of a Radical Price, could equally have been titled $26.99: The Price of Hardback Hyperbole. There’s nothing “free” about it, except perhaps its composition. Anderson has already had to apologise for lifting unattributed chunks of Free from Wikipedia including, irony upon irony, the entry on “free lunch”.

But the battlefield for this looking-glass war is the pricing of information, or what everyone is now obliged to call content. Information wants to be free, says Anderson, who elevates it to a principle, and says that free will be the business model of the 21st century.

Gladwell says information doesn’t know what it wants, but digital corporations do, and they want information to be free (from publishers and content creators) in order to make more money.

One of the examples of Anderson’s “free” thesis is YouTube:

All those random videos on YouTube are just dandelion seeds in search of fertile ground on which to land. In a sense, we’re ‘wasting video’ in search of better video, exploring the potential space of what the moving picture can be.

Still, as Anderson admits and Gladwell takes pleasure in ramming home, YouTube doesn’t seem to make money from the new “free” business model.

Anderson’s book began cooking before the credit crunch took hold. For a new media dispute this one doesn’t just founder on irony. It also plays out in the past. Anderson’s Free has all the limitations of a timely book which was dated almost before publication. Gladwell’s review was commissioned on the New Yorker’s print lead time.

This is clear when both Anderson and Gladwell ignore the latest analyses of YouTube and its role in its parent company Google’s grander strategy. YouTube’s losses are likely nowhere near as severe as Gladwell portrays. Google can well afford them.

Price-cutting, and giveaways have long been a favoured, and rather unradical, business strategy, as Rupert Murdoch deftly demonstrated in building up the Times in the 1990s. Murdoch, too, knows the power that comes from owning apparently loss-making businesses.

There is a big change coming, and for businesses it isn’t one of the “free” business models that Anderson cheerleads. Content aggregation and distribution is in the process of becoming a global digital utility. The social and political consequences go far beyond pricing and the tech utopianism of Anderson. The point Gladwell makes in passing is in fact the most important – in whose interest will that distribution process work?

There is nothing free about server farms. Google’s digital factories may be hidden in Iowa and Finland but their management lies at the heart of its success. And in the meantime that success is having an impact on content creation at the micro-level. Yes, the writer. There is something very old-fashioned about a literary dispute.

Anderson makes – reportedly – a couple of million dollars a year in speaking fees. Gladwell has re-invented the book promotional tour as a paid-for event. A ticket to see Malcolm Gladwell Live! costs more than the book that the show notionally promotes.

So if the Anderson/Gladwell debate has a future, it’s one in which you’ll pay for ringside tickets to see them engaging in the intellectual equivalent of the Worldwide Wrestling Federation or, to be kinder, heavyweight boxing.

And perhaps a little feuding might add to the showmanship. Don King could probably advise. Still, live performance is once again a business model for writers. There might even be a book in it.