Examples of businesses who make money by giving their content away for free
In my last post, I looked at the Creative Commons model (and their book “Made with Creative Commons”) where people choose to share their content, ideas, models, designs and art freely. If you give that away for free, how does your business survive? This post covers 3 different case studies out of the 24 published by the Creative Commons book reporting on how different businesses and entrepreneurs had managed to profit. They cover a wide range from artists, musicians and writers to electronics manufacturers and data and content platforms. Many of these are charities and non-profit, but certainly not all.
Some use the content they publish freely and open-source as advertising. This is a way to attract customers to more personalized services they also provide.
Others, such as an open-movie animation studio (The Blender Institute), provide their movies for free and make money by selling things such as merchandise related to their films.
The book describes a multitude of ways businesses have found to make money. Many get funding (either private or public) and others use crowd-sourcing or request one-off pay-what-you-want donations.
Still others profit from making their content available free online (such as the top-selling game “Cards Against Humanity”) and charging customers who want the physical version. Even though they could print it off themselves because it is freely available online, many are still willing to pay to have it done for them. This post covers some of these ideas in more detail.
In my last post, I talked about the book Made with Creative Commons by Paul Stacey and Sarah Hinchcliff Pearson. I looked at the Rijksmuseum for example. A major motivator for them is that they recognize people already “take” their content without permission. By providing it freely, they are able to control quality as well as encourage further interaction and “visits”.
By Nassim Tiachachat, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Part of what Sparkfun sells then is their commitment to open-ness. They sell their values and can be considered an early sustainability-committed company for this reason.
If you visit their site, they have all sorts of blog posts and further information beyond just their products. They provide information and engage customers through all sorts of ways.
For example, I visited their site today (during Coronavirus lockdown) and their website leads with a link describing how their engineers are working from home and posting photos at what their at-home electronics workshops look like. They then have further links and information about what you need to start your own at-home workshop.
They ask customers to tweet photos of their own workshops and talk about what’s working (and not) so they can respond and help with solutions.
What they feel they compete on - and the reason customers choose them - is because of their excellent service. While you can get the exact products they have designed more cheaply on EBay, they make sure to out-sell their customers in terms of service, support and innovation.
“Rather than designing a new product and protecting it in order to extract as much money as possible from it, they release the keys necessary for others to build it them- selves and then spend company time and re- sources on innovation and service.” (from ”Made with Creative Commons” book )
Their mission is clear in helping provide high quality educational resources for all. However, they especially support disadvantaged students. Basically, they provide free courses that many students have to commonly take (e.g. in Mathematics or Communication) including free textbooks that those students would have otherwise had to buy.
“We do this by providing affordable course materials designed to strengthen learning using open educational resources (OER). Because learning is about student success as well as affordability and access, we apply learning science insights and learning data analysis to develop iterative improvements to our course materials and learning tools. Lumen’s OER course materials are engineered to improve subject mastery, course completion and retention.” (from Lumen Learning website)
Despite its social goals, it is a for-profit company. The “usual” model for this type of approach would be to get paying customers via offering customized services or Premium packages. They don’t.
Their alternate model is successful because they provide a solution that most universities struggle with. The problem they help solve is how you help disadvantaged students entering university “get up to speed” in the knowledge they require at university. Moreover, they help those students succeed and stay in school.
Although top universities are committed to raising their levels of equality and diversity, when they first started recruiting and accepting disadvantaged students on large scales many found those students struggled. This was for a number of reasons.
For some, they were missing key subjects or knowledge at the right level for university. Others found they couldn’t afford all the “extras” that studying costs such as the enormously expensive textbooks most courses rely upon. For these reasons, among others, the drop-out rate is much higher for disadvantaged students than for others.
Consequently, most universities eventually realized that if they recruited disadvantaged students, then they had to commit to supporting them to be successful. This meant offering solutions, support and expertise that many did not already provide.
Setting up and doing this well and comprehensively is time-consuming and expensive. It takes a lot of expertise and experience so many universities found that when they tried to do this themselves in-house it was expensive and often not as successful as they hoped.
Therefore, having an external provider who offers pre-packaged solutions you can buy at a lower cost than it would be to do yourselves is extremely attractive. This is what Lumen Learning does.
They provide a number of pre-made course with free tools and textbooks for the students who take them. Moreover, they are well-designed by proven experts and are constantly updated.
For this reason, Lumen Learning no longer does much customization or bespoke packages. They make money in helping universities implement these packaged courses for thousands of disadvantaged students at a time. Scaling that up and ensuring it is successful (e.g. the students learn what they need to know and don’t drop out) is what Lumen Learning “sells” instead of their courses.
This is radical in higher education because it has traditionally been structured the opposite way: courses are considered to be highly valuable Intellectual Property (IP) and so are rarely shared.
Lumen Learning is able to convince universities to do “it” differently partially because the course packages they offer are basic. These are standardized courses that universities usually have to offer to many thousands of students. There is little difference in content from institution to institution so actually the levels of IP are less than they normally would be.
Universities find the Lumen Learning approach attractive because it is both more convenient and cost-effective than if they did it themselves.
Lumen Learning help universities:
“-replace expensive textbooks in high-enroll- ment courses with OER;
-provide enrolled students day one access to Lumen’s fully customizable OER course materials through the institution’s learn- ing-management system;
-measure improvements in student success with metrics like passing rates, persistence, and course completion; and
-collaborate with faculty to make ongoing improvements to OER based on student success research.” (From ”Made with Creative Commons” book)
Since the game is so popular, I won’t describe it in too much depth. It’s advertised as entertainment for “horrible people” and purposefully crosses almost every line of political correctness that they can find. For example, you can buy a card extension with a series of cards all about butts.
They have a very strong branding and approach (“our cards are just as awkward and despicable as you and your friends”) which differentiates them from the rest of the market. And yet, they tap into humour that is almost universal.
The game allows, no it actually forces, people to be naughty and a bit rebellious against normal social rules. Yes, this is the game for people who like fart jokes or weed or...do you get the idea? And even if you don’t like to snicker about boobs or sex, you need to in order to play the game.
While there are obvious attractions to a game that celebrates naughtiness, it arguably is not the reason for its success. While their approach has created a very strong following and brand, they think their success is based upon their dedication to being as open and transparent as possible in a whole range of ways.
This is why I wanted to cover them. While a number of businesses and artists mention that they make money from their customers because they have developed a relationship through the content they provide for free, Cards Against Humanity takes this further. Much further.
They mainly make their money by selling physical versions of the game. However, over the years they have experimented with all sorts of ways of both making money and being playful in the way they do that.
For example, one year they had an “anti-sale” where they raised prices. $5 extra on Black Friday. Nothing additional given or different, just costing more. And people bought their anti-sale product in the thousands.
Another year customers who bought their game got all sorts of prizes in return. Such as money or a used car.
They’ve also sold many versions to donate to charity where the box and cards are simply another colour. They did this, for example, with pink for Breast Cancer.
There is often a political or oppositional purpose to their promotions. For example, one time they sold games where the profits would go to buy up land beside the Mexican border to make it more difficult for Trump to build his wall with Mexico.
And, because they have a relationship with their customers based on this playfulness and “surprises” people are willing to play back and respond with money.
What a review of the Creative Commons book and the companies above demonstrate is that there are many ways of providing value to customers that they will pay for. One way most companies do this is with Sustainability Marketing which I talk a lot about on this site (see my navigation bar or Publications page for further reading on that topic). Each of these businesses do this in some way, but also with a “twist”.
Some use the content they publish freely and open-source as advertising. This is a way to attract customers to more personalized services they also provide.
Others, such as an open-movie animation studio (The Blender Institute), provide their movies for free and make money by selling things such as merchandise related to their films.
The book describes a multitude of ways businesses have found to make money. Many get funding (either private or public) and others use crowd-sourcing or request one-off pay-what-you-want donations.
Still others profit from making their content available free online (such as the top-selling game “Cards Against Humanity”) and charging customers who want the physical version. Even though they could print it off themselves because it is freely available online, many are still willing to pay to have it done for them. This post covers some of these ideas in more detail.
In my last post, I talked about the book Made with Creative Commons by Paul Stacey and Sarah Hinchcliff Pearson. I looked at the Rijksmuseum for example. A major motivator for them is that they recognize people already “take” their content without permission. By providing it freely, they are able to control quality as well as encourage further interaction and “visits”.
By Nassim Tiachachat, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Sparkfun
Sparkfun is an electronics manufacturer which publishes all their designs and manufacturing details online. Essentially, they create all sorts of new electronics and then don’t patent them. Instead, they publish them and make their designs freely available for their competitors as well as the public to use.Part of what Sparkfun sells then is their commitment to open-ness. They sell their values and can be considered an early sustainability-committed company for this reason.
If you visit their site, they have all sorts of blog posts and further information beyond just their products. They provide information and engage customers through all sorts of ways.
For example, I visited their site today (during Coronavirus lockdown) and their website leads with a link describing how their engineers are working from home and posting photos at what their at-home electronics workshops look like. They then have further links and information about what you need to start your own at-home workshop.
They ask customers to tweet photos of their own workshops and talk about what’s working (and not) so they can respond and help with solutions.
What they feel they compete on - and the reason customers choose them - is because of their excellent service. While you can get the exact products they have designed more cheaply on EBay, they make sure to out-sell their customers in terms of service, support and innovation.
“Rather than designing a new product and protecting it in order to extract as much money as possible from it, they release the keys necessary for others to build it them- selves and then spend company time and re- sources on innovation and service.” (from ”Made with Creative Commons” book )
Lumen Learning
I mentioned in my last post that I led a project to create one of the early OERs (Open Educational Resource) so I was interested to read about Lumen Learning. They provide free and open learning resources (e.g. textbooks and courses) online for colleges and universities.Their mission is clear in helping provide high quality educational resources for all. However, they especially support disadvantaged students. Basically, they provide free courses that many students have to commonly take (e.g. in Mathematics or Communication) including free textbooks that those students would have otherwise had to buy.
“We do this by providing affordable course materials designed to strengthen learning using open educational resources (OER). Because learning is about student success as well as affordability and access, we apply learning science insights and learning data analysis to develop iterative improvements to our course materials and learning tools. Lumen’s OER course materials are engineered to improve subject mastery, course completion and retention.” (from Lumen Learning website)
Despite its social goals, it is a for-profit company. The “usual” model for this type of approach would be to get paying customers via offering customized services or Premium packages. They don’t.
Their alternate model is successful because they provide a solution that most universities struggle with. The problem they help solve is how you help disadvantaged students entering university “get up to speed” in the knowledge they require at university. Moreover, they help those students succeed and stay in school.
Although top universities are committed to raising their levels of equality and diversity, when they first started recruiting and accepting disadvantaged students on large scales many found those students struggled. This was for a number of reasons.
For some, they were missing key subjects or knowledge at the right level for university. Others found they couldn’t afford all the “extras” that studying costs such as the enormously expensive textbooks most courses rely upon. For these reasons, among others, the drop-out rate is much higher for disadvantaged students than for others.
Consequently, most universities eventually realized that if they recruited disadvantaged students, then they had to commit to supporting them to be successful. This meant offering solutions, support and expertise that many did not already provide.
Setting up and doing this well and comprehensively is time-consuming and expensive. It takes a lot of expertise and experience so many universities found that when they tried to do this themselves in-house it was expensive and often not as successful as they hoped.
Therefore, having an external provider who offers pre-packaged solutions you can buy at a lower cost than it would be to do yourselves is extremely attractive. This is what Lumen Learning does.
They provide a number of pre-made course with free tools and textbooks for the students who take them. Moreover, they are well-designed by proven experts and are constantly updated.
For this reason, Lumen Learning no longer does much customization or bespoke packages. They make money in helping universities implement these packaged courses for thousands of disadvantaged students at a time. Scaling that up and ensuring it is successful (e.g. the students learn what they need to know and don’t drop out) is what Lumen Learning “sells” instead of their courses.
This is radical in higher education because it has traditionally been structured the opposite way: courses are considered to be highly valuable Intellectual Property (IP) and so are rarely shared.
Lumen Learning is able to convince universities to do “it” differently partially because the course packages they offer are basic. These are standardized courses that universities usually have to offer to many thousands of students. There is little difference in content from institution to institution so actually the levels of IP are less than they normally would be.
Universities find the Lumen Learning approach attractive because it is both more convenient and cost-effective than if they did it themselves.
Lumen Learning help universities:
“-replace expensive textbooks in high-enroll- ment courses with OER;
-provide enrolled students day one access to Lumen’s fully customizable OER course materials through the institution’s learn- ing-management system;
-measure improvements in student success with metrics like passing rates, persistence, and course completion; and
-collaborate with faculty to make ongoing improvements to OER based on student success research.” (From ”Made with Creative Commons” book)
Cards Against Humanity
Cards Against Humanity is (and has been) a top-selling card game for almost 10 years. And yet, they actually publish the game (and all their cards) freely online for people to download and print themselves.Since the game is so popular, I won’t describe it in too much depth. It’s advertised as entertainment for “horrible people” and purposefully crosses almost every line of political correctness that they can find. For example, you can buy a card extension with a series of cards all about butts.
They have a very strong branding and approach (“our cards are just as awkward and despicable as you and your friends”) which differentiates them from the rest of the market. And yet, they tap into humour that is almost universal.
The game allows, no it actually forces, people to be naughty and a bit rebellious against normal social rules. Yes, this is the game for people who like fart jokes or weed or...do you get the idea? And even if you don’t like to snicker about boobs or sex, you need to in order to play the game.
While there are obvious attractions to a game that celebrates naughtiness, it arguably is not the reason for its success. While their approach has created a very strong following and brand, they think their success is based upon their dedication to being as open and transparent as possible in a whole range of ways.
This is why I wanted to cover them. While a number of businesses and artists mention that they make money from their customers because they have developed a relationship through the content they provide for free, Cards Against Humanity takes this further. Much further.
They mainly make their money by selling physical versions of the game. However, over the years they have experimented with all sorts of ways of both making money and being playful in the way they do that.
For example, one year they had an “anti-sale” where they raised prices. $5 extra on Black Friday. Nothing additional given or different, just costing more. And people bought their anti-sale product in the thousands.
Another year customers who bought their game got all sorts of prizes in return. Such as money or a used car.
They’ve also sold many versions to donate to charity where the box and cards are simply another colour. They did this, for example, with pink for Breast Cancer.
There is often a political or oppositional purpose to their promotions. For example, one time they sold games where the profits would go to buy up land beside the Mexican border to make it more difficult for Trump to build his wall with Mexico.
And, because they have a relationship with their customers based on this playfulness and “surprises” people are willing to play back and respond with money.
What a review of the Creative Commons book and the companies above demonstrate is that there are many ways of providing value to customers that they will pay for. One way most companies do this is with Sustainability Marketing which I talk a lot about on this site (see my navigation bar or Publications page for further reading on that topic). Each of these businesses do this in some way, but also with a “twist”.
