How many of you hear that something is free and find your feet drifting towards it? How many times have you heard that something is free and automatically veer away from it? Free can mean so little and yet accomplish so much. It's a powerful word. Free.

What am I going on about? Do I have a point to this? Yes, just bear with me. How many of you have tried to use "free" to try to get or keep customers, or keep the attention of people who might need the nudge? How many times has "free" failed you? If it has this might be why.

We are bombarded by entities daily who need our attention. Actually they need (want) our our money. We are constantly told that sites earn money by making us watch or view ads. Some of these sites give rewards or free cryotocurrency. Did you know that a lot of these are scams, in a way. Let me explain. In many cases, for every showing of an ad, the site will make a set amount in cash money. If someone clicks on an ad the host pays more money. When I was showing ads, I could get up to 55¢ for each showing and about $9 per click (but I have seen payment offers of up to $23 per click). Of course, I never got paid because they claimed I cheated the system. That's another common scam for another time.

So where does the scam come in here? Maybe it's not a scam per se, but it's not cricket either. Crypto Faucets come to mind so let's use them in this. Most faucets load their site with ads. One popular set if sites uses pop-overs, pop-unders, and standard banners, in total showing a dozen or more ads every time they get a visit. Even at 3¢ a showing that's 36¢ for that visit. How much do they give back? Usually less than 1¢. That's the scam and the power of "free". They promise a lot, and give very little in return, but because they gave something they don't tell a lie (not exactly). Of course, people find out the truth of things, get mad, leave, never come back, the site eventually folds, and the owners go broke, spend the money on booze and are never heard from again.

The cereal industry got it right (they actually inspired this post). They gave free stuff away in the boxes. The Carmel popcorn is another good example. Toys, games, rings, stickers, tattoos, books, CDs, records, magic markers, anything they could get in the box and not take up to much room, was fair game. They didn't just do endless runs of the same inclusion. They mixed things up all the time, knowing that little kids could pressure parents into a purchase far easier than an army of marketers. Even when the kid found out the inclusion was usually cheap junk (usually won after a bloody battle with a sibling), they didn't care. When the next box needed to be bought, the next inclusion was there, waiting to be claimed.

Both of these examples may seem to not have anything in common, but here it is. Both freebies had something of perceived value. A freebie without value is just, well... Litter!

Source images via Pixabay. Concept and compositing by Omnigrapher