Tales from the parasite economy
Companies have come to depend upon free advice and labour, and freelancers are now accustomed to the business catch-cry of "I'm sorry, we don't have the budget for that". In this post, Paul Wallbank argues it's tough being a freelancer in a declining industry - and the rise of the parasite business doesn't help.
“We haven’t got a budget for that” is the freelancers’ curse and one becoming increasingly common in the parasite economy where companies look for freebies to make up for their falling margins.
An email from one event organiser last week illustrated how the parasite economy works, or doesn’t, when companies come to depend upon free advice and labour.
“I was wondering if we could set up a research call at a time convenient for you to help me understand the IoT landscape in Asia,” wrote a London-based events organiser to me last week. “How it is being utilised in your industry, and what topics we should cover on the programme?”
The event Samantha (not her real name) is working on charges between $900 and $2,800 for a conference pass with even greater fees for those exhibiting.
Like most writers and journalists, I’m a sucker for these sort of requests. A sad combination of ego and a willingness to lend a hand means the first reaction is to say, “Sure I can help you.”
However I’d been there before with a Sydney-based event organiser for an almost identical event a few years earlier. That time I gave lots of advice and introductions to speakers and exhibitors. Jeff (again, not his real name) from a different event organiser got lots of value from two cups of coffee.
After half a dozen emails and meetings I asked if there was a prospect of some paid speaking or consulting work out of the event I’d helped him organise. Jeff replied with a genuine air of sadness, “I’m sorry, we don’t have a budget for that.”
With Samantha being based in London, it was unlikely I’d even get a cup of coffee out of her – so with a wry smile I replied.
“Thanks for reaching out to me. For that sort of work I’d be asking for a consulting fee. If you have a budget for that, I’d be delighted to help.”
It was early morning in London so I knew I wouldn’t get a quick reply, which gave me plenty of time to reflect on how the ‘no budget’ and related ‘tap your brains’ syndromes are the bane of the creative industries.
Everyone from journalists and writers through to graphic designers and musicians suffers from the ‘no budget’ syndrome. Regardless of how much an organisation allocates for executive retreats, shiny head offices and nice coffee machines for their hordes of middle managers, there never seems to be much of a budget for those actually creating content.
This is very different from the vision sold to us a generation ago when the belief was the ‘knowledge economy’ would gleefully rain money down on value-adding creatives. We’re seeing a similar lie being sold now with the ‘gig economy’ being pushed as offering work at our convenience when in truth it just means shuffling around a bunch of poorly paid assignments which are little better than Britain’s ‘zero hour contracts.’
While journalism is bad for this, the speaking industry is probably the worst for exploiting talent where companies like Samantha’s gleefully maximise their profits by having no budget for speakers or consultants – instead they coax people into speaking for ‘exposure’.
Another aspect of the parasite economy is the disconnect between salaried employees and freelancers, with the former not understanding the value of time. This manifests itself in many ways, my favourite being ‘advisory panels’ where the government and corporate managers organising them simply don’t comprehend that it costs the self-employed members time and money to attend meetings while the salary drones are paid regardless.
The PR industry is a good case of this disconnect as well given many of today’s managers and leading practitioners came of age in a time when most journalists were staffers and the freelancers were well paid.
As a consequence those PRs are often oblivious to the modern reality of freelancers desperately fighting for the attention of time-poor editors who in turn are trying to get publications out while juggling dwindling contributor budgets and staff cuts.
That disconnect underpins the parasite economy. While the bosses of event organisers, media companies and PR agencies strive to maintain their upper-middle-class incomes, times are only going to get tougher for freelancers and junior staff like Samantha.
So it was with no surprise when Samantha got to work in her West End offices that morning she replied, no doubt with a polite smile: “Thanks for your quick response. Unfortunately we wouldn’t have the budget for consulting fees for this type of thing. But thanks anyway.”
Paul Wallbank is a freelance writer. Mumbrella commissioned and paid for this article.
Let’s also add to this the many times where agencies are asked to pitch for a project which never comes to fruition. Essentially providing a significant value of work, advice and ideas on the back of a false, or unapproved promise.
An old employer of mine once pitched for a multimillion dollar client, spending well over $50,000 to produce a great deck and a full animatic. They won the business, and then got no work for 12 months.
After 12 months the agency were told they needed to pitch again for the next piece of work.
No wonder that client went bust.
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If you don’t value your work no-one else will.
If you give it away for free you shouldn’t be in business – and very shortly you won’t be.
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If I had $10 for every time I’ve been asked ” can I pick you brains” I’d be a very happy man.
It costs 30 years of experience to give fast accurate and robust advice. And you want to “pick” into that vault.??
It starts with agencies pitching for free
Then doing work for free or next to nothing just to show they’re in business,
Sadly you can’t fix or stop this. You can refuse the work however and let others suffer the cowardice. There’s heaps of other more worthwhile careers out there.
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Disagree, there can be and is a time and a place for free work – exposure CAN be a good thing: but one needs to learn the balance and to see when they are being taken advantage of.
Critical to Paul’s point that when an organisation is putting on an event FOR PROFIT, then the core of the event – the speakers – must surely be paid.
TL
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Totally agree, great article. As well as “clients” taking you for a coffee, sometimes they stretch to taking you to lunch, so they can “pick your brains”. But a $20 pasta is no match for the years of expertise they expect you to hand over. It is not even commensurate with a freelancer’s lowest hourly rate.
I often also get told “we have a small contributor budget” from clients when they are trying to pay the lowest per-word rate. But at least they are prepared to pay something.
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How timely that I should read this at the precise moment an email comes through from a client telling me they only have a budget for a couple of hours work, but that I should “fully immerse myself” in the project in my spare time (“perhaps on the weekend!” it was thoughtfully suggested). I felt like writing back, a) if you want full immersion, pay me and b) I’m freelancer, there’s no such thing as spare time.
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I’m going through this right now and have been for a few years now, even after expanding my ‘skill set’ offering from just art direction to writing, design, illustration, digital design, and so on to just survive.
The other client comment is ‘If you do this one for free there will be more work down the track’. There never is.
Good article Paul Wallbank. What’s the solution?
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Glad to see this issue raised. We experience it daily.
People want Game of Thrones on a K Mart budget, and an intern to do it. Meanwhile qualified, talented people can’t keep enough work going to stay in the industry.
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For years I have been saying that vendors pay PRs and agencies bucketloads to pass info on to publishers who are expected to publish for nothing. All they are doing many times is being a sort of mailman. Nice money if you can get it.
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Interestingly, if you Google the phrase “Mumbrella commissioned and paid for this article”, Google serves up exactly one search result: this article. Keep in mind that in nature there are symbiotic, as well as parasitic, relationships. As a freelancer, try to be a bird eating well off a hippo’s back rather than a tree hosting a strangler fig.
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Hi Montague,
It would appear that this is indeed the first time we have used that wording, however it is not the first time we have paid a freelancer for an article. We felt it was important to point it out in this instance due to the nature and tone of the article.
To clarify, if we commission an article from a freelancer/ journalist, we will pay them for it.
Our chief reporter, Steve Jones, works on a (paid) freelance basis for us too.
https://mumbrella.com.au/about
Thanks,
Vivienne – Mumbrella
I’ve been on editorial panels for free, helped set up entire publications, spoken at conferences and the promoter of all ventures charged a fortune while not paying for their talent. For a while I asked for the to donate to charity on my behalf and then asked to be on their do not call register. They still call me.
The problem is that many still speak / write for free and until this stops, the game continues.
Shall we start creating a blacklist? Conference organisers are the worst in my opinion.
I do still give my time to not for profit orgs and professional associations. I figure they’re a worthy cause although I don’t expect an Australia Day honour any time soon.
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Great article this is everywhere.
Agencies getting caught out for lack of technology, trying to run an RFP with no intentions of entering into a partnership but doing it for educational purposes.
The reality? we all let it happen, experienced and knowledgeable people are taking advantage of every single day. They get asked to bend over backwards, they are the ones who have to say no.
When will agencies learn to hire knowledgeable people as the leaders in their businesses and stop letting un-experienced newbies make big decisions because the leaders don’t want to take the risk.
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Good article. I have definitely seen most of this first hand, as I am sure many have. If it isn’t a 2 way street relationship – never any point in giving stuff away.
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This is a great article about an important and complex issue
Would mumbrella tell us what percentage of their speakers at 360 are paid (with money)?
Publishers like mumbrella are monetising now via events primarily.
Because that’s mostly it for a revenue model for many publishers these days
Many mumbrella speakers do get rewarded – exposure, ego, spiritually whatever
But not money mostly
Where does that sit in this debate?
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Sadly many in the creative industries are not particularly commercial and they suffer optimism bias, thinking if I do this one for free more will follow. But is client who wants to have a fee free transaction a client worth having?
A simple, straight forward and polite ‘no we don’t work for free’ and ‘no we don’t pitch for free’ would be a wake-up call to those rude enough to expect that we should. To recalibrate unreasonable expectations we first need to change our behavior. Why is it so hard to just say no?
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Paul,
The problem lies with your first response…….It should have been;
Sure Samantha I’d love to help.
I bill out at $XXX per hour for this kind of work, how many hours would you like to schedule? I’ve attached a primer to get you up to speed with recent industry updates (i’ll only be billing you for 30 mins for this material even though it represents many hours more).
I’m available on Tuesday the 14th of March between 9-1pm London time or Thursday the 16th of March between 4-7pm London time for a video call if you can let me know which time works best.
Can you forward me a list of questions first so we make sure you get the best value for your money.
Regards,
Paul “The IOT expert” Wallbank
P.S. and yes for those of you who are old school Zig Ziglar salespeople….I really did use, the “puppy dog close”, the “alternative decision close” and the “best value” close in just 3 paragraphs.
Coffees for closers Paul…..go buy the books – http://amzn.to/2lIhgxG
🙂
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Spot on. As a publisher we push back hard against this equation and I have a nice diagram that shows the flow of money between the three parties mentioned and the work effort required by each.
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Hi Jeremy,
Thanks for the question. It’s probably worth making the distinction first of all that the focus of this article is about conference organisers (often fly in, fly out generalists looking to tap into whatever the fashionable topic of the time is) asking an expert for a free consultancy when they want to make a hit-and-run on a market where they have not employed experts of their own. We employ people (usually journalists) knowledgeable about their topic areas to do the curation for us.
But to answer your question about speakers (although you know the answer already because we’ve spoken about this before), for the vast majority of people who put themselves forward for Mumbrella360, their motivation is not, as you correctly say, to earn a speaker fee. I’d say that the most common motivation is indeed to get the opportunity to demonstrate their expertise to around 2,000 of the industry’s top marketing and media professionals.
Because the speakers tend to be quite high level, often at global CEO level, their decision on whether to participate is influenced far more about where they can most usefully spend their time.
After we have run the industry callout process (which is highly competitive – I’d say we are only ever able to accommodate about 20% of the session proposals we are always so grateful and delighted to receive) we take a look at whether there are any gaps on topics that we believe would be useful to fill with a paid speaker (usually from overseas – because we aim to give our delegates an experience they won’t see elsewhere on the local circuit). We then form a pragmatic view on whether the reputation of the speaker will bring in enough ticket fees to cover their costs. I wouldn’t be sensible to put a figure on how much we pay professional speakers, but it’s fair to say that although the speaker budget is smaller than I’d like as an organiser who wants to put on the most amazing event possible, it’s a five figure sum.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
That’s a really roundabout way of saying “we’d rather not clarify on the hypocritical payment practices of Mumbrella” isn’t it?
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Hi Journo McJournoface (If that’s your real name),
Nope – nothing hypocritical – we’ve always been 100% transparent that most people who choose to speak at our events do so because they judge that talking to our audience has a value to them. We’ve never called for all speakers at other people’s events or our own to be paid. I speak at a lot of other people’s events myself, and mostly (particularly with panels) that’s for no fee when I see a value in speaking to that audience. If I didn’t see the value, I wouldn’t choose to speak.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
Hi Tim
As you know, I live in a glass house. Well soon to be glass – I’m constantly renovating as we must.
I had meant to throw a nerf ball not a stone though.
M360 is an interesting middle in this issue. Most speakers get a lot out of just speaking. I was aiming a bit more at the author really, in the sense that it’s horses for courses in the parasite economy, made a little more obscure by the degradation of revenue models for publishing, conferencing and agency(ing). Sometimes ‘free’ isn’t free at all, as the case a lot with M360 and speakers who don’t formally get paid but are rewarded for their time. Yes, there are parasites, but as with the oxpecker and the rhino, maybe its mostly a matter of perspective.
Jeremy