Information should be free and other fallacies #MRX #MRMW

Free Money (film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At the recent Market Research in the Mobile World conference, a battle cry was raised in favour of free information leading to great excitement from the audience. Who WOULDN’T be in favour of free? Personally, I’m in favour of free food, free housing, free cars, free electrical power, free clothing, free education, free healthcare. Oh, and free music, free art, free literature, free movies, free parks, free holidays. Just slap the word free in front of anything and I’m in favour of it.

But come on. Let’s be realistic here. Whether you like it, people need to get paid for their time so they can feed and clothe and house their families. Just because you want information to be free doesn’t mean other people should work for free. If you’d like information for free, then go collect that information yourself. Go hire a few people to build the technology to collect the information. Go hire people to process the information into a format that is usable. Go hire people to monitor the quality of that data. Go hire the people to collect the information for you so that you can do your work. Oh, and go do all of that for free.

Are you curious about #TheListenLady? Why don’t I just give that away for free. It’s just data. There’s no insight in it. In fact, you can find every single piece of information in that book through a simple internet search. It’s all on the Conversition website. It’s in every presentation I’ve ever given at a conference or webinar or case study. It’s just data. But I put hundreds (thousands?) of hours into that book to thoroughly collect and helpfully package important information . I sacrificed evenings and weekends and holidays. I sacrificed time with family and friends. I deserve to get paid pennies on the hour for that.

We all love the word free but I challenge you to think beyond the lure of the word. If you got something for free, you probably got crap.

Information wants to be free / Insight is expensive / Action is priceless. Love this @dirkgently! #MRMW—
Greg Heist (@goInnovateBlog) July 19, 2012

"Information should be free. Insight is expensive. Action is priceless." Great thoughts from @dirkgently #mrmw—
Jason Ebbing (@jebbing9) July 19, 2012

At #MRMW "Information is free, Insight is expensive and Action is priceless".—
Forethought Research (@ForethoughtRes) July 19, 2012

#EPIC RT @adricrocha: Information should be free. Insights (knowledge) should be expensive. Action is PRICELESS says @dirkgently #MRMW #MRX—
Cristina Quiñones (@cristinaq) July 22, 2012

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