Open Source & Blogging:

Power of Free Content to Empower or Enslave

!!

jQuery UI Datepicker !

MarcGrabanski.com !

LOTS of UI Dev

Who?Marc Grabanski

!!!

Publisher of:

Currently...UI/UX Development Consultant

http://FrontendMasters.com

This Talk

• Free ideology

• My path and mistakes

• Benefits and detriments of producing free content

• Sustainability of free

The Free Ideology

• Education should be free.

• Do free things for the community is a requirement.

• Release free software and tools is always the better choice.

Equal Access

Benefits of Free Ideology

• Viewed as altruistic.

• Gain influence & connections.

• Speaking engagements.

• Impact lots of people.

• Receive good job offers.

• Viewed as altruistic.

• Gain influence & connections.

• Speaking engagements.

• Impact lots of people.

• Receive good job offers.

Benefits of Free Ideology

Can’t do it for these reasons!

Getting Started Making Free

Things

My Path

Passion-First Career Choice

Web Career Wasn’t Recommended

Dot-com crash.

No jobs!

Everyone said “stay away” from the web.

• I started web design regardless.

• To me, the web was awesome and important.

• I’ll figure it out...

Beginning My Career

“Be a Java developer, you’ll make way more money.”

Against Economics, Towards Passion

Web UI is what’s most important

...IMO

Passion-First Writing

Open Source & Blogging...Why?

Getting Started Blogging

Staring Line• No starting audience.

• Writing mostly just to remember things.

• Published research / things I’m interested in.

Passion is Your Fuel for Free

Blogging

People Notice Passion-First

Writing

Growth

Passion-First Coding

jQuery UI Datepicker

Used by a few ’06-07

Used by everyone ’08-13

Workshops and Conferences

• Spoke at 40+ conferences

• Italy, Ireland, Israel

• Met a lot of amazing people

All for Free

Benefits of Free

• Trust and Influence

• Connections

• Opportunities

Personal Tour of Jerusalem

But is Free Holy?

I Killed My Blog

Could Have Been Avoided!

Things That Sucked

• Created a lot of work to maintain projects and articles.

• Didn’t want to bankroll my work with a big company.

• Had bills to pay...blogging was taking up tons of time.

Tangible Detriments

• Free is Expected (700+ emails to debug people’s code problems)

• Wallet is empty (I wanted to remain independent).

• No long-term sustainability.

Is Free Sustainable?

• Free products get sold, close down or weird things happen to them all the time.

• Turn data into targeted ad space.

• Or corporate sponsored.

Potential Rewards of Free

1. Page Views

2. Social Following

3. RSS & RSS-to-email Subscribers

4. Email Subscribers

5. Ad Revenue

6. Product Revenue (Books, etc)

7. New Job

1. Page Views• Measures how many people visit

your site.

• Not very actionable.

!

2. Social Following

• Proof of thought leadership.

• Not everyone sees every tweet or Facebook post.

3. RSS & RSS to Email

• Proof of readership.

• Not everyone reads RSS....people ditched RSS.

4. Email Newsletter Subscribers

• Personal communication (feels 1-to-1)

• Highly trackable and actionable

5. Ad Revenue

• $ = Sustainability

• Overhead to manage ad space

• Potentially annoying to users

6. Product Revenue

• Highly sustainable

• Repeat customers“Stacking bricks”

• Value builds over time

7. New Job

• Usually a result of what you did for free.

• Usually awesome and more in-line with your interests.

1. Page Views

2. Social Following

3. RSS & RSS-to-email Subscribers

4. Email Subscribers

5. Ad Revenue

6. Product Revenue (Books, etc)

7. New Job

My Rewards

Succeeded at idealism.

http://marcgrabanski.com/articles/developing-value-stronger-than-money

I failed at sustainability.

Avoid my mistakes...

Build a holistic following, not just RSS and social.

Credit cards and email addresses means they

like your stuff.

100% free isn’t always holy or righteous.

Think sustainability.

Publish paid products. Can start with a $4.99 PDF using e-junkie or

leanpub

Maybe you won’t get rich...

But you’ll gain relationships with

people who like your work enough to pay.

Customers grow with you as you get better over time and release

more products.

http://www.noeltock.com/startup-snippets/the-long-game/

Long term sustainability is honorable.

Sustainable operations can produce more free content

Questions? !

Marc Grabanski @1marc