It’s interesting how both people and businesses have gotten a sense of entitlement about stuff. By stuff I mean goods and services. Right now I’m watching a video from “Revenue Bootcamp” titled “Will anyone pay for anything?”.
So they have a panel of people who basically say they expect most stuff on the internet to be free. Guy Kawasaki provides a succinct summary of the panel here. It really is a nightmare:
They hardly pay for anything. One panelist doesn’t even pay for Internet service but grabs it from an unsuspecting neighbor. They are not loyal to Facebook in the sense that if Facebook started charging, they would just use another service. The only service that the boys are willing to pay for is Xbox Live; this means that all companies have to do is create another Halo. How hard could that be? :-) They are remarkably enamored with Gmail and the services that comes with it. Can it be that email is the killer app of social media? They seldom intentionally click on any kind of advertising, and they never buy anything because of the advertising. They feel little obligation or guilt about getting everything for free, so if someone tells that that unless they start paying, a company/service/site will go away, it’s not going to work.
This is a nightmare for anybody trying to start a business. But what is really funny to me is businesses behave exactly the same way both toward each other and toward their employees.
There are a few things you can do in the face of this: whine, cry, curl up in a ball and hope it will go away. Or do the really hard thing and start thinking. People do pay for stuff. Even in the video the panelists do pay for things. It goes back to basics though: what people value they will pay for. Virtual crap has no value. Things that are widely available have little value. Tangible stuff has more value than virtual.
The panelists will buy gadgets (cell phones, laptops, etc). They’ll pay for services until there is a free alternative.
Really scary for my friends who are in to Internet marketing is that click through advertising is being ignored. So more for all those ebooks on how to make $90K/mo selling shit through adsense.
Thing that scares me about all of this is the drive for free. Things cost money. It’s how we measure and exchange value. Developers have to pay for their gear, software, books, and training. Mechanics need tools, books and training. Manufacturers have to pay for raw materials. The people that produce the raw materials have to pay to extract, grow or make the raw materials. Nothing is free. Movies, tv shows, music, books, articles all have costs associated with them. This crappy article cost me 15 minutes of time to write. 15 minutes I could have spent doing something else.
At a certain point if there is nothing coming back then people will stop doing stuff. So if journalists arent paid they will stop journaling. Programmers won’t program. Things will grind to a halt. We’ll go back to growing carrots and potatoes. Crap – seeds cost money.