The people a giveaway brings

A new brand runs a giveaway in its launch week. Follow, tag three friends, share to win.

Thousands enter. A week later the follower count has tripled and almost nobody has bought anything. Within a month many of the new followers have quietly gone. The founder is annoyed, as if these people had broken a promise.

They did not. They enter giveaways. That is what they do, all day, across dozens of accounts. They are not dishonest and they are not lazy. They behaved exactly as the offer asked them to.

The same is true of the shopper who only appears during the sale, the reseller who clears the discounted shelf, the reader who takes the free guide and never returns. Put something out, and the people it was built for will come and take it.

The indignation is the expensive part. It pushes us to design the next offer to punish them, which irritates everyone else. Or it convinces us that the market is ungrateful, which is worse, because then we stop learning from it.

It is easier to say it plainly. Ah, these are people who collect free things.

Said like that, there is nothing to be angry about. Either stop leaving free things out, or leave them out knowing exactly who will come, and count it as the price of being seen.