Last week I was asked to help a British events manager to help with their research for an Internet of Things conference in Singapore.
This is the sort of thing I would happily do for free or a cup of coffee if it were a friend or a worthy cause but this was a stranger working for a large multinational corporation who’d found me through a LinkedIn or Google search.
Knowing that tickets for their European and North American events are around two thousand dollars, I politely asked for a consulting fee.
What happened next is predictable and I discussed some of the issues on the Australian marketing and media site, Mumbrella.
In a content and context driven world it’s interesting how the business models of the middlemen increasingly rely on exploiting those delivering the product – be it Uber, Facebook or a big conference organiser.
How sustainable those models are remains to be seen. It’s hard to see how entire industries can survive on underpaid or unpaid workforces.