They’re the same people who bombard you with questions about minutiae, spelling and grammar errors, and citation glitches. They also have the characteristic of usually NEVER becoming paying customers, because most often they don’t actually have any money to spend. Unfortunately they also take slight very easily so simply telling them to take a hike doesn’t work either.

If you’ve got one of these, my deepest sympathies, but they’re an unavoidable consequence of doing business on an open internet.

There are still a lot of people out there though, who DO appreciate the efforts of webmasters so we shouldn’t let the miserable, ungrateful few spoil our fun!

By the way Dave – thanks for a great blog : )

On the other hand, when you know the cost of something, FREE can be good. Again, using retail furniture as an example, FREE DELIVERY (usually $50 to $200) and NO SALES TAX are strong incentives because people expect to pay them and know how much they are saving. The offers seem more real because they are.

One last example. In 1995 we advertised FREE Sunrooms for a luxury home builder. The response was amazing because people knew that the value of this offer was around $30,000, However when we ran the offer a second time, people had already taken the offer for granted as an entitlement and were looking for an extra discount.

Go figure.

I’ll make two cases, one for and one against “free.” I am a graphic designer. At one point in the ’90s, a colleague confided to me that he had never purchased any typefaces — he was able to get by with pirated and free typefaces. Big mistake. First, non-professional free typefaces are (usually) inferior to professional fonts. Second, pirated and free fonts are notorious for holding viruses, and that same colleague’s computer got hosed shortly after our conversation. Finally, why would I withhold money from companies who are building beautiful typefaces for my designs? I especially like to purchase typefaces from little-known but extremely professional companies, and I seek out those vendors. Those typefaces help set my designs apart.

And here’s a “free” success story: I’m also a filmmaker/sound designer, and a company from Canada called me and asked if I wanted a full set of DVDs of sound effects for free. No catch. I said yes, liked the collection, and have now purchased several other audio and video collections from them. Great business model: hook me with a free collection and then I’m a customer for life.

But back to your point about entitlement and gratefulness: it’s a trait sorely lacking from many business transactions, on both sides. I have spoken with sales reps who have been so stressed-out that they forgot to thank me for my business. And many customers expect the moon…for the price of a cab drive to the airport. Everyone is concerned about the state of the economy, but that shouldn’t mean that decency and respect and care for each other is thrown out the window.

By the way, speaking of gratefulness and free stuff, thanks for posting (multiple times) on the HF-S10 camera. I have an old GL2, and the possibility of salvaging all my old glass/filters from that camera for use on the HF-S10 is making me excited, even though they won’t be HD-quality glass…

Thanks again!

It’s been my experience, that the people who tend to complain are the ones who have ZERO business sense. They don’t spend a few seconds to think through how a person or company makes their money, instead they seem to believe that somehow by just using your site or reading your content that you are making a profit off of them thus the sense of entitlement.