Worth Paying For
Some food for thought on free content from Patricia Handschiegel, owner of the cross-platform advisory startup and incubator, 9:
Good things cost money to make and consumers like good things. The media/internet/etc 2.0 mindset is that everybody wants to shop at the flea market when in reality, plenty of consumers are willing to buy Christian Louboutin.
I could get all the free fashion content I want online but 98 percent of those sites don’t have access. They don’t get to pull in any sample they want, they’re not flying to Market and Fashion Week, etc. around the world to find the things I can’t find myself. So, in addition to consuming the stuff people are giving away on the internet, I pay to have greater access through other outlets because for me, that’s the value.
This is how consumers operate. It’s why despite that there are free football games all weekend long, hundreds of thousands of people pony up major cash to have subscription packages. What drives consumers to want to pay for things (including content on platforms) is value, driven by either access or quality.
Free also signals that something isn’t worth paying for, even if it is. It’s something people see all the time in service industries like consulting and PR. The second somebody says, “I won’t pay to have XYZ from a company,” it signals that the company has little true value to that person. By giving away your product for free out of the gate, you’ve trained them on this perception. The only way out is to create a second channel of value and work to migrate them over. Some will go, some won’t. That is how it goes.
Charging consumers for quality and access doesn’t mean they won’t like you. In fact, it’s likely the other way around. Getting them to adapt to paying for products that cost money is more a marketing than a business problem. Create value or the perception of value, and work to migrate those who are interested towards it. It’s a basic truism in any business on any platform, offline or not.
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