> That's not the point he was trying to make, I think. The point is, he was > given the 'why bother' attitude, presumably because 'it wouldn't make any > money'. Sure, sometimes you have to give stuff away for little or nothing > in return -- big companies do it all the time -- to make money (especially > on a new product).
Big companies can afford to use loss-leaders, but they certainly don't use them as an indication of their success. They don't say to their shareholders "see how many free keychains we gave away at our dealerships to people who came in to look around during 'free keychain weekend!' We're a success. Sure, we didn't sell a single car, but we gave away tons of the free stuff so we're sittin' pretty!" I'm not saying this exactly applies in this instance (it may or may not), but it does illustrate how irrelevant your point is to the issue at hand. Now, if he'd said something like "we only sold 200 copies of product X before we gave away the free PDF, but directly after the 3,500 downloads our sales of product X jumped to an additional 500 in 1/3 the time!" then yes, he'd have a correllation to make a success story from. As it is, saying to a list full of professionals who are in an industry of money earners that one's been successful against the comments of others because your free download product has been downloaded thousands of times does little more than get a collective "meh" from the majority. I'd personally congratulate the guy for producing something that has been downloaded so many times, but you simply have to understand one basic thing here: it doesn't mean a lot in a consumer industry to be able to brag about the amount of times you can give something away for free. You can't even say that a high number of downloads is indicative of a lot of people enjoying the product; after all, if you're a guy handing out pamphlets on a street corner does the fact that you manage to give them all away also mean that everyone who took your free piece of paper shall enjoy whatever the pamphlet was about? No. It was free so they had nothing to loose by taking it and looking at it, but it doesn't mean you've been "successful" or even accomplished anything. I'm not trying to belittle the efforts done on that product, but I think you need to be very clear on how erroneous what you're saying here is considering the people it's being said to. Steven "Conan" Trustrum Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage: http://www.trustrum.com "The only real people are the people that never existed" -- Oscar Wilde _______________________________________________ Ogf-l mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mail.opengamingfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/ogf-l
