Joel's Mutterings

Monetizing Free

Can you turn free in to a successful monetization model?

Author Charlie Finlay is betting you can and in short he offered up his book free (10 free hard copy advances) to anyone who would agree to post a review to Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Borders, Powells or Indiebound. Since Mr. Finlay is not an established author, there’s no big marketing campaign for his book and he is counting on word of mouth to drive sales.

Free is not new, the question really is whether or not it is an effective marketing strategy or not? Casinos often lead with free offers of rooms, drinks and even the very money you gamble with in hopes of attracting and priming your gambling pump.

Some would say this is about loss leaders and or an investment in brand building but not all agree that this is a methods that work. Discovery CEO and President DavidZaslav said in an on-stage interview at the NAB Show in Las Vegas that he didn’t see an economic model for free web distribution of long-form content. He said he’d only distribute episodes online if circumstances forced him to, and so far the numbers aren’t significant enough. “If people start watching content on mobile phones and on the web in droves, we will have to go there or we will lose market share.

Certainly those who are fans of the iTunes App, music and video content store would disagree. On iTunes there is no shortage of free stuff including a free song every week and lots of other good and free content and with more then a billion songs and shortly around the time of our next dinner application sold through the online store.

Nedra Weinreich, a self described social marketing gal-about-town trying to make the world a better place, puts her thoughts succinctly into 140 characters on twitter, “Sure, “free” can be monetized - give it out for free, underwritten by advertisers/sponsors. Or have 2 tiers - free/premium.”

Ryan Chittum, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and current staff writer for the Columbia Journalism Review feels, “Newspapers make fools of all their paying subscribers by giving their product away free on the Web. Why pay $400 a year for The New York Times when the same thing is free online?”

Maybe we are really confusing the value of free and its value propositions with what is being marketed in the first place. Clearly some things thrive when a free marketing model is included while other things suffer. Is it the ability of free to be monetized that is the issues or the value proposition of the product offering that makes the difference

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