How to Beat the Freebie Culture
Original Photo by Valerie Reneé
Store owners are worried that the quality of the freebies are getting too good, making it harder to sell their own items. Many also resent the sense of entitlement that some customers starting to develop due to all the things they can get for free. It is scaring enough people to call for a ban on freebies.
How can I make money selling (filling-in-the-blank), if people are giving them away for free? Rest assured, this problem is not new nor exclusive to the virtual world. There are ways to beat this.
Understanding the Origin
Let’s start at the root. Why do people spend their time to make something for free? What’s their motivation?
Freebies are created by three types of people:
1. Someone who creates for fun and likes to share or help new comers.
2. Someone who makes freebies to promote their shop and reward visitors.
3. Someone who wants businesses to fail by creating freebies to dry up the market.
For all practical purposes, type #3 don’t really exist. There are far easier ways to greif businesses than to spend time making high quality freebies. This leaves only people who create freebies to help others or to promote shops. The question I would like to ask is: Can we morally justify stopping these people from making freebies?
Freebie Police: Hey man, what a great hat you’re making. How much will it cost?
Joe Creator: Oh, I was thinking about giving it away for free so people can enjoy it.
Freebie Police: Arrest him! Don’t you know freebies are ruining businesses?
Joe Creator: But…
Freebie Police: *Slap!* No talking back!
Furthermore, to really kill freebies, Linden Labs would have to completely disable the ability to transfer items with no price tags. That makes about as much sense as shooting someone in the head to cure their headache. Anyone who believes he can stop the freebies is burying his head in the sand. It’s morally wrong and technically impossible.
No, freebie creators are not the problem. Neither is stopping them the answer.
Understanding the Resentments
What is really bugging the shop owners into this irrational hatred of freebies are the complaints. It only takes a few ungrateful bungholes to make a creator regret giving away their hard work. Let us dissect these rude remarks to understand what is causing them.
The complaints generally fall into two categories:
- Category #1. People who complain about your prices:
- Your stuff is too expensive. There are others like yours that are far cheaper!
- OMG, I would never pay that much for crap like that!
- L$500 for that? You better lower your prices if you expect any business.
Let me tell you a secret about people who send you these kinds of complaints.
You ready?
They secretly want your product.
They are either being cheap or simply can’t afford it. Hey, if someone can get a substitute product cheaper or for free, why waste time messaging you about it? Just go and get it. If the price is too high, just move on. Why bother telling you that they’re not going to buy it? Do you go around telling every overpriced product creator that they’re too expensive? That would waste so much time!
Deep down, they’re hoping that you’ll lower the price so they can afford it. The ones that are being rude are simply too dim to understand that insults only provoke rather than persuade.
Whether you want to lower your price, it’s your decision. Personally, my prices are based on sales performance rather than rude instant messages. I usually just ignore complaints like these. Everyone’s trying to save money these days. There no need to get mad over this.
- Category #2. People who demand freebies:
- When are you going to start giving away your new widget for free?
- Hey, we didn’t get a group freebie this month, what’s the deal?
- I just missed the freebie you gave away last month. Please send me another copy.
Pavlov’s dogs is a classic experiment where a group of dogs are shown a stimulus right before given food. Overtime, the dogs develop an association with the stimulus and began to salivate for food as soon as they saw the stimulus. This classical conditioning experiment has trained the dogs to associate an unrelated stimulus with food. In one aspect of this experiment, the researchers decided to show the stimulus to the conditioned dogs, but did not give the dogs any food. The result was that the dogs became frustrated and aggressive. Understandably so! They were promised food but they didn’t get any!
| “ Anyone who believes he can stop the freebies is burying his head in the sand. It’s morally wrong and technically impossible. ” |
Now imagine a Second Life resident being told of a great group to join that gives away freebies monthly. Or perhaps a shop that regularly gives away a quality dress in scavenger hunts. Sure enough, quality freebies come at regular intervals and everyone’s happy. But suddenly the freebie disappears and in its place is a product that looked like the old freebies except now it has a price tag. A price tag that’s not L$0. This is when the anger, frustration, and the not-so-polite freebie demands begin!
All this is to say, if you have been getting these kind of freebie demands, you need to realize that you are the cause of it. You have mismanaged their expectations. Yes, people are smarter than dogs. Of course there will be people who recognize that freebies are gifts and they have no right to demand them. But in large enough groups, as freebie hunters often are, there will always be someone who respond to his frustration with rudely demands filled with choice words. It only takes one of those messages to ruin your day.
- If you want to avoid this kind of complaints with your generosity, you can:
- Don’t give away any freebies. (awww)
- Avoid limited time freebies. Try permanent freebies, they’re less work!
- Give freebies sparingly enough to not form a pattern.
- Avoid giving freebies that resemble items you wish to sell.
I use to make the mistake of giving away newly released pets to my group for free. Yes, the exact ones that I was going to sell. Even if it was only for a limited time, I was unknowingly conditioning people into thinking that they should be able to get my products for free. Boy, some of the complaints I got really made me want beat them to death with their own bloody arm! When I stopped making this mistake, guess what? No more rude demands for free pets! How about that? It was my own fault after all.
Make sure that the distinction between freebies and paid products are blindingly obvious! Because when you do this, it will be harder to confuse what should be free and what shouldn’t. Thus resulting in far less freebie demands on paid products.
| “ Make sure that the distinction between freebies and paid products are blindingly obvious! ” |
If you never had the habit of giving away freebies yet you still get messages demanding freebies, then simply ignore them. These are probably the same kind of crazies that will email Apple demanding free Mac Books.
Understanding the Solution
Lets say, magically, all the creators agreed to stop making freebies. Guess what, there are still people who sell similar stuff at cheaper prices. What then is the next course of action to stop these people who are devaluing your product? A call for price fixes?
Do not buy into the scarcity mentality. Furthermore, I implore you, don’t believe that removing something that “devalues” your product is the solution. Because the oil companies seek to remove electric cars for the very same reason.
There are many many (legally) free software on the internet. Some are superb in quality. This has not killed the software industry. The Gimp did not kill Photoshop and Ubuntu has not killed Windows.
Freebies are great. They are labors of love and generosity. They help those who have nothing to have a better experience in Second Life. More importantly, they drive the market to demand better products and provide better solutions. Rather than looking to take away value from the existing market, look for ways to improve it!
- There are so many ways to be better!
- Be better through superior support and documentation
- Be better through higher quality products
- Be better through updates with fixes and new features
- Be better through convenience and clarity
- Be better through regularly creating new products
Freebie makers are generous, but few are generous enough to provide all that for free. Embrace the change, don’t fight it. Change is good. Change is inevitable. As freebies get better, paid products should strive to become even more awesome. That is how you can beat the freebie culture.
-Todd
p.s. If you’ve found this post to be valuable or would like to see this blog continue, consider letting me know by subscribing or telling others before it’s too late.
I link to your blog, tell people to read it… and I hope your numbers pick up soon, this is a great resource and whilst I won’t bend your ear if you give it up, it strikes me as you’ve got a wonderful freebie here!
Disabling the give free option in SL won’t actually affect the situation, apart from being completely insane and breaking a lot of content. If I want you to have a freebie I’ll charge L$1 and work out a system whereby you touch item x get given L$1, then pay L$1 for the “freebie” or use one of my almost free tools that will only give you L$1 ever so you can buy it… net result is that it’s still free to you and the moaners still moan.
I’ve just released a free product that a load of people asked me for. As you say in your list of ways you can be better, although I have provided documentation, it’s not as good as I give for my higher priced objects, and it clearly says I’m not giving you support. So far no-one has asked for support either, but I’m sure they will.
But part of my pricing strategy (such as it is) is an estimate of the time to build to sales ratio, part of it is an estimate of support time too. Each customer might not get their L$50 worth of support on each product, but it takes a few L$50 to add up to enough to cover my time at anything like even minimum wage.
fantastic, well-written, well-thought-out post. thank you.
I`ve put my stores only freebie in the surveytaker i got for free at XDFusion, now i`m getting something back for it. i have 130 answers allready :)) tnx for the blog todd
There is also a lot of value in a well stocked store where you can find what you want/need. Spending a whole day finding a free item can be more costly then buying it at a store.
This is the best article i’ve read so far on freebies. Great points!
I have been slowly reading articles here over the past week and they are all excellent advice on Second Life business with real Second Life business knowledge. This post was no except. You hit on all the finer points and explained it in a clear and concise way that everyone can understand. Thank you!
Very nice article. :) The fact that you said bunghole was enough for me. :p
Great Article! You’re absolutely right :))
Very well said. Here here!
Haha, I’m glad you approve my choice of words Dove. Thank you guys for reading the blog and sharing it.
There seems to be a lot of heated freebie discussions lately. I just wanted to defuse some of the polarizing views. All this angst isn’t doing anyone any good. >=]
I think you hit the nail on the head here. I love to create and help newbies, even set out a help packet for them. Sadly, I have slowed down on making freebies after a situation like you mentioned. It’s very disheartening to hear someone complain that your hard work s*cks cause it doesn’t come in thier favorite color. Ppl will be ppl tho.
Off topic… Love your blog and really hope your numbers come up a bit more. I try to linkin when I can. I know your advice and thoughts have helped me business wise alot over the past couple of months. Keep Rocking! :)
I’ll chime in as well in praising this latest article! Another winner, Todd.
I don’t care about that 99,9% freebie products, as long as my high quality products state-of-the-art. It’s safe to say, the more freebie mass produced goods, the greater is my sales. Yes, i like that.
I have never cared about freebies, they don’t bother me. Freebies have never been a problem and they still aren’t. The quality of freebies aren’t that great, lets get that clear. And that’s because Second Life doesn’t really have great graphics to start with.
A lot of the problem is that Second Life isn’t getting better – that is, Second Life merchants are unable to innovate their products beyond a certain point.
I have felt this constraint for a long time now, and its a large reason I am down in SL. It has dumbed itself down for merchants who want it easy.
A secondary problem is a situation outside Second Life – a lot of people simply have bad taste. Now wait, before you get upset now, think about it. A lot of people are unable to really criticise what they are doing, they don’t understand when they look like a fashion disaster, or why so many of us complain when their facelight appears to be 10000000 watts!
Well life isnt easy or fair… we all have to innovate and learn in order to get better. Duh. And that other part which is that too many content creators have customers who are trailer trash with no taste. Sorry.
Thank you. The calm rationality of this entry is like a breath of fresh air.
Ms. Callisto is absolutely right; if SL were improving, people would WANT to buy new stuff. For example, every single female avatar in SL would line up to buy tops that aren’t painted on, T-shirts with text and artwork that aren’t vacuum sealed into one’s cleavage, and jeans that aren’t similarly vacuum sealed… well, you know. The JIRA entries begging for that capability have been sitting out there for a long, long time… Bueller?
Sure Melissa, they would all stand in line. And at the same time complain that SL has become so much laggy/slower. Those kind of updates usually means that more complex shapes needs to be rendered, which takes longer.
Given the current “break” of skins in the 1.23 RC it’s pretty clear that someone at Linden Lab is looking at the avatar code. That still doesn’t mean they’ll change the fit of clothes mind – you’re looking at some interesting deformations of the mesh, or a new mesh to achieve those things and that would give rise to all kinds of issues.
SL can either advance, or it can stagnate, with designers going to other virtual worlds. Have you seen the Nurien demos? Tops that aren’t painted on, skirts that aren’t strips of cloth only sewn together at the waist, ties that aren’t painted on. I’m sure we’re seeing at its best, but surely the best designers will go where they can best realize their ideas.
Sorry for getting away from the topic of freebies.
Fantastic, well-written post and you are completely right.
In my opinion, it’s not so much the freebies as it is the customers attitudes. I know a certain group of people who do nothing but hunt and blog about the freebies. In turn, all of their followers flock to this place and that place to grab up the free items. They walk around wearing this stuff like a badge of honor. It’s like a quest to see who can get the best for nothing. And forget about supporting the designer… Yes, some people do like to create things as a reward for their customers or to attract new potential customers. It’s the folks who take advantage of it that make you shake your head. I don’t mind the freebies, but I do think that people should support the designers as well. The designers are there hoping to make money to pay tier, to upload textures, etc. Even if you can’t afford to buy an outfit, drop them 10 or 20L and say thanks! Be grateful that they made that outfit! If they weren’t in SL, you’d still be wearing LL’s default outfits or some crumby free junk.
It’s easy to think that others are the ones that should change, for it’ll alleviate yourself of any burden. However, that often times solves nothing. Hoping for others to change is not the solution nor the point of my article.
It’s not the free stuff (no trans promotion gifts etc.) that destroys the economy, it’s full perm reselling scams.
Hypatia Callisto – you might wantto apply for a Creators License for BlueMars VW. The beta version is being launched in June.
Using different tools for a differnt type of platform might re-energise your creativity :)
Agreed Mercedes…it’s the mentality change that’s the problem…..something that wasn’t an issue in 2006/7.
Another great post Todd! I love this blog.
“The Gimp did not kill Photoshop and Ubuntu has not killed Windows.”
Best line ever.
Thank you so much for this article. I once tried to explain my Pay It Forward attitude about freebies but I don’t think people got me. This article really lays it all out.