Printed Matters

I was thinking back on the weekend to the words of a certain northern community newspaper publisher with whom I had dealings. He had a fairly stock answer any time one of his salespeople (or me, the web guy) wanted to give something away for free. He hated giving stuff away for free. So he’d say, “It just knocks the value right out of it.”

Which on the face of it looks like a pretty good argument. He was an intimidating sort, so that counted as an argument, at least.

In my context, for example, I wanted to give real estate listings away for free in a new real estate vertical for the website, in order to make the listings useful. My thing was always that listings are useless unless they’re comprehensive and complete, and the correct way to proceed is to jumpstart these things by giving them away for free, build a user base, and then do upsell or sell advertising around it.

“That knocks the value right out of it,” he’d say.

But no, it doesn’t. There is still value in things that are free. The success of free dailies like Metro, which makes all its revenue from advertising, should be an indication of that. I forget who it was that said it – Murdoch, maybe – but someone said (and I paraphrase): “Never in the history of humankind has a company developed a large audience for something and then failed to make money from it.”

What the publisher was really saying, of course, is that it knocks the value perception right out of it. And he has a point. If you give something away, people get used to that and you have a hard time selling it or selling into it. He’d have come to that conclusion after some experience in the business – he was a successful publisher for many years.

But boy, what a difference a word makes. The addition of that one word, “perception”, turns the problem into a marketing problem. If you’re having trouble with the value perception of something, then it becomes a marketing job to put the value back in.

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