The whole world wants a freebie, and many of us are giving our ideas, intellectual capital and service away to online magazines in the hope of getting a link or a little bit of publicity.
Bringing the idea undone is the unfortunate reality that web is awash with free pointless material that adds little value. Your contribution, however valuable, gets lost in the static of PR driven articles and SEO optimised fluff.
This is why Google are trying to tie social recommendations into their search results, although it’s hard to see how your cousin’s LOLCat posts are going to add any more value than the generic garbage served from services like eHow.
Yet every day there’s more callouts for free content – desperate journalists and publishers beg for our ideas or labor in return for some ‘exposure’.
And that ‘exposure’ floats away into the ocean of noise and irrelevance filled with the rest of the ‘free’ content.
Giving stuff away for free isn’t working well anymore and for those of us who are trying to build a business around that model, we’re struggling to get found or heard in the morass.
Along with the wasted time, the danger is we start giving away our best, most valuable work in order to get attention and then we have nothing left to sell.
Consumers are waking up to this and beginning to focus about what they read online. We should too.
As a marketer for micro and small business I must disagree. I give away free marketing audits then charge business for me to fix their marketing and implement my recommendations. This is a service auditors charge up to $2,500 for and it has great value to a business to understand their marketing better.
Hi Greg, thanks for the comment.
My point is more to do with using “free” to get attention. The number of people giving away stuff to journalists and outlets like the Huffington Post or eZine Articles is crowding out good online content and making it harder for us to be heard.
I’ve no problem with giving a free taster, I’ve been doing that for years with my businesses, but we all know we have to draw the line where that free audit turns into billable time. I fear many people are being drawn into giving away a lot of free time and intellectual property into a marketplace that doesn’t really care.
What I guess it comes down to is having a strategy around what you’re giving away. It sounds like you’re doing that really well and it great to hear more about the successes.
I’ve seen this with friends on the ‘scene’ in the US – where their work is expected to be done free just to be included with the A list set, those who are paid insane amounts for doing what they do – but expect others who have not yet ‘made it’ to settle for ‘exposure’ as a way of lifting their visibility. But really just a means of exploiting people.
The whole A-list thing is a worry. Personally I suspect that many of the alleged elite bloggers aren’t making as much money as they’d like the world to think.
Another aspect of the free model is that people aren’t valuing what they aren’t paying for, which devalues the work (assuming there is any value to start with.)