Free is Not Really Free: The Attention Currency

Free is not really free. For every free offer we take, we actually pay with our most precious currency – our attention. This is why the free model would have to evolve in order to survive.

The FREE Debate

Chris Anderson, the editor of Wired and author of Long Tail started it all with his recent book Free: The Future of a Radical Price. Malcolm Gladwell, renowned author of Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers, reviewed the book in the New Yorker with a frown. Seth Godin, marketing guru and author of the recent Tribes and many others, stated straightforwardly that Gladwell was wrong, and has dubbed this discussion as The FREE Debate at his wonderful Squidoo website (all relevant links are there). And the debate rages on…

Basic Assumption Problem: Free is Not Really Free

I would never rival this brilliant trio. In fact, I think they’re all right in some way. I do, however, wish to point out a problem with one of the basic assumptions in this discussion. All this debate lies upon the assumption that when something is offered for free, whoever accepts the offer actually receives it with zero costs. But this is incorrect. We pay. We pay even for free stuff (to take Andy Sernovitz’s term stuff for products and services). It’s just that the currency is different. On the online world, we pay for free stuff with the currency of attention.

I think this argument is true in most cases, including offline, but to limit my own sweeping statement, I would focus on examples from the online arena.

The Attention Currency

When summarizing Anderson’s book, Godin wrote “Free leads to virality, to trial and to attention”. And here, in this last word – attention – lies the payment.

It was Godin who opened our eyes to the difference between interruption advertising and permission marketing, about a decade ago in his book Permission Marketing. There, he showed us how the abundance of advertisements fighting for our attention from every billboard and screen, are in fact repeating attempts to interrupt us in whatever we’re doing, in order to get our attention to the advertising’s subject; and how the wise marketer would attempt getting the target audience’s permission to get exposed to the marketing message. The outtake from the concept of permission marketing for this argument is that all advertisers and marketers fight over the most valuable aspect of the modern marketplace – the attention of potential customers.

While this is true from the marketers’ point of view, it is also part of our own private lives as individuals in that big marketplace. Our own attention span is stretched thin by both interruptive ads and permission requests from the smarter marketers. And since attention, by the nature of our human brain, is a limited commodity, it is precious to us. We all want to utilize our limited number or attention-oriented brain cells towards the issues and values that we dear most. The truth is that each of us has to suffice with the amount of attention our brains can manage, and we can’t buy any more attention even if we have all the money in the world. Maybe that is why our attention is so precious to us.

The Costs of Free

When someone offers stuff online, it comes with not-so-virtual costs. Research, writing, hosting, design, licenses, maintenance… somebody has to pick up the bill. Sometimes, we pay for the stuff we like and this way cover the costs, like when buying a book at Amazon (this link is Squidoo’s affiliate link to Anderson’s book. I use it here since they promised that all proceeds go to charity). And sometimes, it’s the person behind the offer that pays for the costs, and then we deem the offer as a free offer, because there’s no out-of-pocket payment. But we do pay. We pay with our attention, the out-of-brain currency that is so precious to us, that even money can’t replace it.

The Free Model will Evolve

People are not stupid. We all love free stuff, but even when we don’t put it into words, we usually understand that free comes with the price of attention. We read the free article, but we do give some attention to the ads surrounding it. We happily take the free sample, but we do know that we’re expected to consider buying more of it, and giving it consideration out of our limited attention is a sort of payment. And the more FREE will spread as a business model – or distribution model (see this nice post) – the general understanding of the attention price that comes with a free offer will deepen.

Does this mean that the free model Anderson describes is doomed? I dare to predict that not at all. Free is here to stay, at least for a while. However, since free offers are not really free, and more and more people understand that we’re actually paying for them with our precious limited currency of attention, free offers will have to evolve. With time, for a free offer to work well, it will have to come with a high value, to add to what the accepting person gets out of it. While on the same time, it will have to limit the scope of attention it requests out of the receiver, in order lower the hidden attention price.

The basic assumption for the FREE Debate should be that nothing is really free, and that in most cases, free actually means that an attention payment is requested. Anderson does refer in depth to the attention payment, but I thought it should be emphasized.

Since marketers are on a mission to get attention as part of their job, this model is valid. However, for the FREE model to succeed, it would have to evolve and adapt itself to a world where FREE is a standard model offered all around. To do so, marketers will need to be creative in their offers, so that the value will be high while the attention-price respective to it, and preferably low. I think this is where the FREE model is heading. In other words, since we’re going to pay even less with the attention currency and get even more out of it, free is about to become even freer.