Free... it's the magic number

By Sam Smith on Mar 31, 08 01:20 PM in Creative industries

We all love free stuff. It doesn't matter if it's a free t-shirt that we will only ever wear to decorate in or the buy one get one free offer on rollmops at your local supermarket (just how much pickled herring does one actually need?), it's not so much what you get free, more the feeling that getting something for free gives you.

I'm going to keep this post short(ish) because a lot of what I was going to say has already been said better, and in more detail, by Dan Ariely his book Predictably Irrational (you can read an extract here).

How often are our decisions influenced by the opportunity to get something for free? Given the choice would you choose a 2 for 1 offer on a product you weren't going to choose over what you were planning to buy? Have you ever bought something extra on Amazon to 'save' on postage costs?

Giving something away for nothing is a common sales tactic in the offline world but it's a difficult thing to convince clients to do on the web. But, if you think about the freebies that influence our decisions, and the fact that it's more about the feeling of getting something for free than what you actually get, we could be missing a trick here.

Giving away digital content is a lot cheaper than physical objects. You don't have to manufacture a million MP3s for example. Admittedly you've got the initial costs to create the content but once it's up there for people to download you could give away 10 or 10,000 and it costs you the same. Continuing with the MP3 example, it doesn't even have to be the version that you want people to buy. Give away a remix and users will often buy the album or a single off the back of it. You've given them an incentive and a positive user experience which in terms of generating web traffic is money in the bank.

So I suppose the big question is, how much does free really cost?