Really? Who is doing this and making money on it? If there are margins on it, someone is doing it. Otherwise it's a shining billion dollar opportunity.
Of course the other problem is getting it in the channel. People who also sell Pepsi/Coke will probably be discouraged from giving away your product. You could target places like hospitals, parks, events, etc...
In any case, I'd love to see the companies who can do this.
If I wasn't running out of server space faster than I could buy new servers already, I'd have bought a bunch of those for the last opensourceworld tradeshow.
Cool. I guess given that people carry 8-16oz bottles of water makes this feasible (lots of advertising surface area for a small amount of water). Better example, I can't give away dirt with advertising on it. There you probably cross the line between cost of production+distribution versus advertising revenue (note, these examples are heavy on the distribution side to attempnt to mimic the apparently free cost of content generation).
yeah. and the water thing only works if you can target relatively high-value customers. But at $0.50 or so a 'click' if you are at a tradeshow or some other concentration of 'high value' customers, it's probably a better deal than paying as much for adwords.
Adwords itself is an example of how some companies are willing to pay tens of dollars per 'click' for advertising. Branded dirt won't usually work, but it might at a nursery tradeshow.
But yeah, nothing but 'free content' is going to work if you are spamming the masses with your advertising. But, I believe that many content creators are willing to create content to advertise themselves. Especially in the technical world, writing has almost no hope of paying the same as technical work, but people still do it.
I suspect the problem will not be that nobody is willing to write content for free, but that we need a new way of vetting the good, credible content from the bad.
Of course the other problem is getting it in the channel. People who also sell Pepsi/Coke will probably be discouraged from giving away your product. You could target places like hospitals, parks, events, etc...
In any case, I'd love to see the companies who can do this.