I have just been out to post a letter and have a bit of a morning walk before sitting down to do some work. While I was out and about I bumped in to a mate of mine who runs a sandwich shop. I’ve not seen my mate for a while, maybe 6 weeks or so, so we had a bit of a catch up on what was going on in the world, some small talk and then the inevitable ‘how’s business’ question came up. I said things were going well over at Talk About Local and said Pits n Pots was doing pretty good as well.
Business it turns out is going pretty good for my mate as well, he said it was a slow start at the beginning of the year but things had really picked up. Then out of the blue he asks, ‘can you put an advert up on Pits n Pots for me?’ ’You can do it yourself mate, just click on the advertise here link and it will take you to the addiply website, sign up, pick your ad, pay with PayPal, job done.’ I replied.
His somewhat dejected response was, ‘Oh I thought you could just stick one up on the site for me, I didn’t think it would cost me.’
The conversation went on something like this.
‘Why wouldn’t I charge you?’ I asked
‘well it only takes you a couple of minutes to put it up and we are mates‘.
‘Ok so if I came in to your shop as I was passing on the way to the station and asked you for a sandwich, for free, you would be ok with that?’
‘You know I would mate.’ (I have never asked my mate for, or expected a free sandwich (Yet!))
‘And if I came in next week and asked for the same, that would be ok? and the week after?’
‘well maybe not every week, but every now and then, you know, I have costs and wages to pay.’
‘I have costs as well, the website isn’t free, I have to pay for it to be hosted each month, then there is all the other costs of actually running it, like my time etc.’
‘Yeah, I see what you mean.’
The issue isn’t that my mate asked or that I refused, it is the fact that people have this perception that because they see people publishing websites using free platforms like WordPress, Ning or whatever then it is ok to ask for some free advertising because the site is ‘free’. Not everybody wants to make money out of running their website, in fact it would be foolish to believe that you could earn a living from it, but as Rick Waghorn over at Addiply says, ‘not making a profit and not making a loss’ are two different things.
I might throw this in to the discussions for the Talk About Local Unconference that is happening this coming weekend in Leeds.