Free is awesome, but free dies

I am all about the free stuff on the
internet – especially in terms of online video and other tools
considered to be in the sphere called “Social Media”. I’ve got free
accounts all over the place. Ustream, youtube, flickr, etc. If I don’t
have it and it is cool I’ll get an account in 30 seconds. Call me a
sucker and I’ll agree with you – I am a sucker for anything free. And
you should be too.

But heed my warning of the free model apocalypse: Free is awesome, but free dies

For the longest time I have been preaching that as cool as all of
these free tools are, don’t bet your farm on them. Paid twitter
accounts are coming ( I said it a long time ago ). YouTube is turning
off the faucet to their free API. And you are going to see more and
more of this in future. If a company provides a strictly free service
online they will eventually crash and burn.

It all eventually comes down to being in business, and part of being
in business is making money. Period. Oh you might find some situations
where someone has a loss leader, or they can funnel cash from a serious
venture into the fun free one. But if all they have is free – make sure
you can live if they up and disappear one day. Consider pumping money
into a business than runs on the Freemium model – get a paid account
and support some of the kick ass work that the company did to build
such a cool service.

Make sure you have a mental note as to what to do if something you
use that is free disappears. Got video on YouTube? Make sure you have a
local copy and you can jump over to Vimeo if needed (Yes also free).
Ideally look into what it takes to eventually host your own video
someday. Due this same risk management for anyplace where you get a
good chunk of your free traffic. You know the old adages: Don’t take
anything for granted, and don’t place all of your eggs in one basket.

Now go out there and mooch off of as much free stuff as you can get your hands on.