The Contagious Power of Making Things Free
People have long been bemoaning the Internet because it has a curious way of making intellectual property monetarily worthless. They want to blame young people for disrespecting copyright law and feeling entitled to get everything they want immediately, without spending any money. And while we all might be a bunch of torrenting delinquents who can’t wait six hours to watch Breaking Bad and need to see it NOW, these complainers are missing the bigger picture.
From an economic standpoint, it makes sense for creative property to be free on the Internet. People inherently know that e-verions of things are worth a lot less (if anything) because the marginal cost of production is zero, the cost of distribution is zero, and books, albums, photos and images are infinitely reproducible. Slap a watermark on it, scare people with a lawsuit, but the people are going to nab things for free regardless.
The Internet is a curious world away from the world of objects, which have monetary value. It’s a world of free things that easily replicate. This offers creative people a benefit even better than money – the ability to grow your reputation and make people aware of your ideas, all over the world.
I run a website that gets substantial traffic but makes me no money. In fact, I pay small hosting fees every month. When I think of what I want to do with it next, I keep thinking of more ways I can expand on our content and grow our audience, all of them by making more free content on the Internet. There is something addictive about making free media and having it consumed by a larger and larger audience.
In a way, the Internet makes karma real. Anthropologists have studied the power of gossip and reputation, showing that people actively reinforce one another’s reputations so that they can treat them accordingly. If you act nice, you get real social rewards. In early humanity, sharing your meat might make people more likely to baby sit for you. Now, not putting ugly pop-up ads on your website might make people trust your content more. Karma, or getting rewards for being “a good person” works better when society has the tools to reinforce and communicate someone’s reputation. The Internet is the greatest tool yet for doing this, which has completely changed branding (that’s another story), and also made it possible to reap substantial social rewards for giving your creative content away for free.
I’m not saying that writers and creative people should just keep writing for free until they’re poor. But what we need to realize is that by giving away our creative efforts for free on the Internet, we are building social karma and gaining an audience that will make our ventures into the world of profitable objects (or ticketed events), much more successful.
For example, my boyfriend is in a band that has until now given away their albums for free. Their current one is Radiohead-style pay-what-you-want, a move he only wanted to make when he felt they had built up sufficient “karma” to make their listeners want to give them money. They make their money from playing live shows, but also – like most bands – from merch. What people like him realize is that if your project has social currency, people will want to pay for the physical objects surrounding it, like T-shirts.
It occurred to me recently, when he created, produced and started selling a Lynx T-shirt, that by being in a band he had accidentally learned how to become a clothing entrepreneur. That’s what’s cool about getting into the world of making free content on the Internet. You get so into DIY culture that, just to get by, you end up learning a bunch of extra skills.
How does this apply to agencies like Zeus Jones? It’s common for agency employees, who are some of the most creative people around, to have lots of side projects that they are making for free, just for fun. Because our day jobs pay our salaries, there’s even less pressure for these projects to monetize. Lately I’ve been inspired by projects like Paravel’s “The Many Faces of …” website. Not only is it cool, but it probably helped their agency gain a ton of attention.
Making something for free is contagious for a reason – it pays off in many other ways.
Image by Joseph Kuefler