Today i was reading a couple of posts in the blog of Prad Prathivi and Ana Lutetia where they express some concerns about the use of freebies as marketing tools. They have interesting points of view. Anyway, was a bit difficult to explain my point of view in a post comment, and i wanted to know other’s opinion too (there is a pool at the end of the post), so i prefered to post too about this. Of course this is just my two euro-cents.

I saw around two kind of freebies, the ones some creators just give for free in welcome areas, new residents areas, infohubs, or even in their own places or stores, like the resident Four Yip does (she has AWESOME stuff for free or for 1L$). The other kind are the ones you can find in some stores as a Marketing Tool, some directly to anyone, some for Group members of the store.

Personally i don’t see differences between the two kinds, i mean practical differences. The reason why they were built is different but the result is the same actually: some people who can’t afford (or just don’t want to buy) stuff has access to products of different qualities to make their Second Life better or funnier.

Thanks to freebies i had my first stuff, learned a bit about how to make particle scripts, had fun or even helped me to look good. Some creators complain about the freebies because they consider that is damaging their business but i think that idea is wrong. If someone goes to a store and just pick the freebies and nothing else that means he won’t buy the products for sale there anyway, because that person doesn’t wants, or because that person doesn’t like the products for sale or because he thinks they are overpriced. The freebies themselves are not lowering the sales of the merchant. If someone wants quality and exclusive stuff they will pay for sure (meanwhile the prices are reasonable).

The freebie thing is a theme that comes and goes from time to time, this was my opinion but, what is yours?

Image in the post by Torley Linden, published under a Creative Commons license.