![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Shop Stuff
Jan. 26th, 2018 05:16 pmEternally bemused by the people who contact me asking for freebies for review, because:
1) back in my day (oh bloody hell that sentence makes me feel so old), you built your reputation as a reviewer first, and then people contacted you about reviewing their stuff, not the other way around?
2) 99% of the time when I ask for their numbers or stats they have no idea what I could be talking about, and if I do get the numbers they're bewildered when I tell them it's not cost efficient, like what could I possibly mean by that...? And then I have to explain that if, for example, I spend £15-20 on a BCA feature it goes in front of 75,000 people who're interested enough in buying British handcrafted items that they've signed up to do so. Stationery isn't a niche market, so that's a lot of potential customers, especially if I spring the extra fiver for a Christmas shopping slot. And the majority are then like "okay, but I'll do it for a free notebook", and I have to patiently explain, sometimes multiple times, that my materials and the postage aren't free. Even if I send them the smallest of my notebooks it'll be approx £9 for materials, plus postage (usually they're not in the UK so £4-£5), so it's £13-£14 to put it in front of the followers they have. One of them had two twitter followers, if you included her self-follow. The maths just doesn't add up; why would I spend £14 for an audience of two people, including the person who received the free one, when £1 more will get my shop featured to an audience of 75,000 people? Those numbers don't even crunch if they had a specialist channel?
3) aside from the maths, I do feel that it's deeply unfair to the customers who've bought a notebook from me and shared their genuine squee on social media. A couple of youtubers have sent dozens of people my way. (I sent one of the youtubers a free notebook for a giveaway she was doing, but she'd bought her first one and her vids featuring it have sent a lot of people to my shop. Not the same thing as a newly started review channel who'd apparently "love to work with" me). And, personally, I always trust a review less if the item was sent for free? I don't think I'm alone in that, so I'd be paying for what I myself consider to be a lesser review? I guess it makes sense to other people, but not to me.
Anyway.
In non-related news: the specialist we've been waiting two weeks for turned up, used his measuring thing, and announced that it was pointless to use the drying machine because we've done a great job of airing the floor dry ourselves and the machine wouldn't get it any dryer. So that's... something.
1) back in my day (oh bloody hell that sentence makes me feel so old), you built your reputation as a reviewer first, and then people contacted you about reviewing their stuff, not the other way around?
2) 99% of the time when I ask for their numbers or stats they have no idea what I could be talking about, and if I do get the numbers they're bewildered when I tell them it's not cost efficient, like what could I possibly mean by that...? And then I have to explain that if, for example, I spend £15-20 on a BCA feature it goes in front of 75,000 people who're interested enough in buying British handcrafted items that they've signed up to do so. Stationery isn't a niche market, so that's a lot of potential customers, especially if I spring the extra fiver for a Christmas shopping slot. And the majority are then like "okay, but I'll do it for a free notebook", and I have to patiently explain, sometimes multiple times, that my materials and the postage aren't free. Even if I send them the smallest of my notebooks it'll be approx £9 for materials, plus postage (usually they're not in the UK so £4-£5), so it's £13-£14 to put it in front of the followers they have. One of them had two twitter followers, if you included her self-follow. The maths just doesn't add up; why would I spend £14 for an audience of two people, including the person who received the free one, when £1 more will get my shop featured to an audience of 75,000 people? Those numbers don't even crunch if they had a specialist channel?
3) aside from the maths, I do feel that it's deeply unfair to the customers who've bought a notebook from me and shared their genuine squee on social media. A couple of youtubers have sent dozens of people my way. (I sent one of the youtubers a free notebook for a giveaway she was doing, but she'd bought her first one and her vids featuring it have sent a lot of people to my shop. Not the same thing as a newly started review channel who'd apparently "love to work with" me). And, personally, I always trust a review less if the item was sent for free? I don't think I'm alone in that, so I'd be paying for what I myself consider to be a lesser review? I guess it makes sense to other people, but not to me.
Anyway.
In non-related news: the specialist we've been waiting two weeks for turned up, used his measuring thing, and announced that it was pointless to use the drying machine because we've done a great job of airing the floor dry ourselves and the machine wouldn't get it any dryer. So that's... something.
