“Everything that becomes digital will become free. There will be a free version, either you will be competing with free or giving it away for free and selling something else. If it is not zero today, it will be zero tomorrow.”
As you can tell from the quote above (as reported on Techcrunch) Chris Anderson, Wired Editor-in-Chief and author of The Long Tail, likes the word ‘free’.
His latest book is entitled Free: The Future of a Radical Price and his speech at Wired’s Disruptive By Design conference touched on what free means for the media industry.
His take is that media companies should combine both free and paid-for content but, and it’s a big but, that the most popular content on the site should be the free stuff and the nichiest niche stuff should be paid for. The idea is to maximise advertising revenues and ‘pass-along’ potential with free content and charge a premium for the niche.
In other words: “The head of the curve will be free and the tail of the curve will be paid.”
But What If You’re Not Charging Anything Anyway?
Most business who are using content to help market their businesses don’t charge anyway – they give it all away for free through blogs, whitepapers and a variety of other methods.
But while there may be no price tag attatched, this content isn’t always as free as it might be.
Intuitively, businesses see content as an effective way to build their marketing databases. So, when they go to the effort of creating a detailed whitepaper or cracking ebook it makes sense for them to ask for an email address in return.
This unfortunately makes it much less likely that people will help share that information via social media – or even be bothered to access it themselves in the first place. An email address might not seem like a cost, but it’s enough to stop otherwise interested readers from engaging with your content.
In the same way that Anderson proposes that media companies make their best stuff free – and only charge for the niche – content marketers should consider whether they’re locking away their best content behind unnecessary barriers.
Further Reading: David Meerman Scott is a big proponent of ’signup free’ content – a tactic he’s used to build his own substantial following via free ebooks.
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It’s a difficult balancing act for me. On the one hand I always here “the money’s in the list” so I feel some pressure to build an opt-in list at every turn. On the other, I get your point about barriers. I guess my best course of action is to test and see which produces better results in my target market.
And then there’s always the issue of how useful the opt-in ends up being. Between bounced messages, opt-outs, and just plain ignored messages, how many people even read my email anyway?
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