{"id":242,"date":"2020-02-15T16:29:00","date_gmt":"2020-02-15T21:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/beomniscient.com\/?p=221"},"modified":"2026-05-22T09:43:56","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T13:43:56","slug":"content-marketing-not-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beomniscient.com\/blog\/content-marketing-not-free\/","title":{"rendered":"There’s No Such Thing as Free Lunch in Content Marketing"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cThere ain\u2019t no such thing as free lunch.\u201d \u2013 Milton Friedman (among others throughout recent history)<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This will be piece inspired by a recent BuzzFeed article<\/a> that outed contributors at \u201ctrustworthy\u201d publications like Forbes, HuffPo, and Inc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To recap the piece: Forbes and others operate using a free contributor model. In addition, their editorial stringency is nonexistent, so authors are incentivized to make their money by other means \u2013 mostly by dropping backlinks and references to their SEO clients in the article. This practice is widely known in the marketing world. However, most readers don\u2019t know about this arrangement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This paragraph from the piece, in particular, is what I\u2019ll talk about in my article:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDeMers and his present and former colleagues are among the many unpaid or low-paid outside contributors who\u2019ve been recruited by sites like Forbes and Entrepreneur for years. The appeal for Forbes and Entrepreneur is a constant stream of content for which they pay little or nothing<\/strong>. Contributors, meanwhile, are attracted by the opportunity to build their profile or promote their views on popular sites with recognizable brands.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Bolding is mine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m going to talk about incentives, free lunch, and why the reader is almost always paying an externalized cost for cheap\/free content that publications pump out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DeMers and his clients (called out in the piece) aren\u2019t really the ones to blame here, as the incentive structure set up by these publications obviously leads to this behavior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This post is mostly written for the non-marketing audience, as this is largely known about in the marketing space. However, I think there are still important points to come even if you know all about this payola business<\/a> in content marketing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Economic Concept of \u201cFree Lunch\u201d and What it Has to Do with Content<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Free lunch essentially means that<\/a> \u201can individual or group can be provided a good or service at no cost to the individual receiving the bene\u00adfit or to anyone else.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Obviously, as the saying goes, \u201cthere ain\u2019t no such thing as free lunch.\u201d Someone always has to pay, it\u2019s just that the cost can be externalized, indirect, or in the form of an opportunity cost.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The phrase was popularized by saloons in the early 19th and 20th centuries<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cDuring the nineteenth and early twentieth century many saloons in the United States offered a midday buffet selection of gratis food to customers who purchased at least one drink. The saloon keepers hoped to increase the number of clients and the amount of alcohol purchased. The \u201cfree lunch\u201d food functioned as a loss leader.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This, of course, didn\u2019t work out for saloons. The cost of the drinks didn\u2019t keep up with the unrelenting pace of freeloaders ruining the economics of the restaurant.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A more interesting angle on this saying, though, comes from a 1898 newspaper<\/a>:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cA free lunch is not very cheap thing after all, when one consider how many feller get poor eatin\u2019 \u2019em.\u201d<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

As Quote Investigator put it<\/a>, \u201cthis adage suggested that partaking of free food did have a price. One may become a saloon habitu\u00e9 facing the dangers of dissipation, indolence, and alcoholism.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I like this quote because it focuses on the consumer, the one who is eating the free lunch. Turns out, there are downsides to \u201cfree\u201d content as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Today, there are dozens of examples of \u201cfree lunch\u201d that are mostly just subsidized by<\/a> advertisers or lots of venture capital. Content publishing is one of the areas I think has truly been underexplored, with the exception of the reliance on the advertising model (which itself is problematic, but we know that<\/a>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I want to talk about is the transaction between the publisher (the consumer) and the author (the producer). Normally, an exchange of equal value must occur for all parties to be satisfied. The direct, transparent route would be an amount of money sufficient to cover the effort and value of the content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s say, for the sake of this article, the value of a given Forbes article is $750.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the absence of this direct, monetary transaction, an author must make up the equivalent value by other means. One of those ways, supposedly, is through fame, or by the inherent value of having a byline on Forbes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, this is bullshit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Image Source<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the \u201cexposure\u201d excuse that has exploited artists with poor business sense forever. Granted, sometimes this is enough value. Sometimes, an honest, high-quality author will publish something of value for free truly because the publication gives them a large platform with which they can spread ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is only my opinion, but I\u2019d wager that\u2019s the case less than 0.1% of the time (and probably far less often than that).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This, however, is the premise of publications like Forbes. People are writing to lift their own name, credibility, and status, and to spread their ideas to a wide and important audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The true case, however, is that the barrier to entry to publish on a site like Forbes is so low that the floodgates have opened (according to marketer\/writers I know who write for these sites, the barrier used to be even lower a few years ago. They seem to have clamped up a bit since some of this bad press has come out).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

People with no important ideas to spread (or desire to spread ideas) are publishing on them, and they\u2019re doing so for some reason.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not a direct financial reward. It\u2019s not for fame\/the facilitated spread of ideas.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s for an indirect financial reward \u2013 the money an author can make from placing clients in these publications. That\u2019s the gist of what the BuzzFeed article covered. The fact that publicists are writing articles and dropping their clients\u2019 links isn\u2019t necessarily news, but I think there\u2019s more to the story than what BuzzFeed covered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You can understand the problem more deeply if you uncover the economic reasons behind it. You can also see that the problem goes much farther than Forbes, HuffPo, Inc, and the common culprits (that now are almost just the scapegoats).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Marketers Subsidize Much of Your \u201cFree\u201d Content<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Marketing professionals seek to gain attention for their companies or clients. They do this through many means, two of which are important for this context: public relations and content marketing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Both of these tactics piggyback off of media impressions to achieve business growth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Someone searches for a keyword on Google. They land on a website, say Forbes or a software company blog (let\u2019s name our software company Payola Inc.). The website gets paid somehow. With Forbes, or another publication, that\u2019s through ads. With a software company, that\u2019s through leads or customers who sign up for the product.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For either of these types of publications:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ROI = revenue generated with content \u2013 cost of content production.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A scrappy marketer can easily see the loophole here: promise free\/cheap content to the publication with the expectation that they\u2019ll give you space to promote your product or client. This is an obvious incentive structure that almost anyone in marketing knows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is why marketers guest post for other blogs. It lowers the cost of content production to almost zero (depending on the editing process) for the accepting blog publication. In this case, however, the transaction is normally obvious and transparent: you write for my blog, and you can drop a backlink to your product or service. It\u2019s almost like a \u201csponsored content\u201d model, in which the incentive structure is disclosed or obvious:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

A marketer can cover their tracks and scale their link building efforts by hiring a third party service or a freelancer to write these guest posts for them. That way, neither the publisher nor Google knows any better, and they can scale their content production and link building for a lot cheaper than doing it themselves, in-house.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, you have a structure that looks more like this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The problem is, the reader has no fucking idea that the companies on the left are involved at all, so their worldview is essentially warped by opaque incentive structures facilitated by \u201ctop\u201d \u201ctrustworthy\u201d publications. In short, they\u2019re paying for the content that Forbes gets for free. This is all the reader sees:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The problem is, for a marketer, this is a really effective tactic. If I could game The New York Times for a backlink, I\u2019d do it in a heartbeat. But that\u2019s hard to do, because The New York Times has high standards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The publications allowing this to happen are making it far too easy for marketers to game. That\u2019s the heart of the issue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pssst: This Is Common and Happens All Over the Place<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I applaud BuzzFeed for doing this story. One cure for all of this is to shed sunlight on it. But their platform isn\u2019t clean of this behavior.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I don\u2019t want to throw people under the bus, but I\u2019m in more than one Slack group that engages in \u201clink trading\u201d and \u201clink placement,\u201d and I\u2019ve seen BuzzFeed offered for placement regularly. You can buy links there for like $100. They\u2019re offered just as often as Forbes, Entrepreneur, and the lot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Apart from the direct link buying the BuzzFeed piece covered, most marketers are, at the very least, trading links and dropping links to friends\u2019 content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This isn\u2019t ever disclosed, which is surely somwhat ethically questionable, but as a marketer, you do what you can to help out friends, build reciprocity, and of course, mention good companies and sources too (not all of this is negative and poisonous).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To an even lower degree, roundup posts and HARO-based content is basically a press release for those people who are featured. Not a lot of people call this out, but if Forbes\u2019 contributor\/marketer written content is \u201cfree lunch,\u201d then HARO & roundup posts are at the very least \u201ccheap content.\u201d The barrier to entry is low, it\u2019s mostly crap (not all of it!), and it crowds up the supply side of the internet with fluffy BS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

This is a cheap press release filled with easy backlinks for marketers<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And if a marketer is working with a freelancer network or agency to help place guest posts or brand links, they often do so only on other software company blogs or lower level publications in their industry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe I\u2019m off here, but that seems (while of dubious ethics) to be less damaging. People simply don\u2019t put the same faith in the truth of a random software blog that they do in Forbes or Fast Company.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the same way that we don\u2019t expect the same political objectivity from the Huffington Post that we do the New York Times, we don\u2019t expect the same quality and objectivity from Random Company Blog that we do from Forbes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

So we have a varying degree of transparency and harm in marketing-driven content:<\/p>\n\n\n\n