There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

That’s a fairly common expression that’s fairly true. How many times has your company bought pizza for the staff, only to find out that you have to sit through a presentation by the CEO, or it is used as an excuse to let you know that you’ll have to work much later for the next 3 weeks?

The same can also be said in the online world. When someone offers you something for free, you have to question why that is. It could be:

• a loss leader for branding purposes
• a tool for upselling purposes
• a way to generate links
• something insidious

Hmm? Insidious? How can that be? Well, let’s take the example of Wordpress Themes. Doing a search on “Free WordPress Themes” pulls up quite a few sites. Now, I’m not going to target one in particular.  But, let’s just say that I did click through to a few of the first page results and witnessed the same behavior.

All of these sites give you the option to look through their portfolio and pick out a theme to use for free – even giving you the instructions as to how to load it onto your site. It’s only after you load it that you notice (if you’re observant enough) that there are some links in the footer of every page.

Ok – links to the company that designed it and gave it away for free – that’s one thing (which is why I list that separately above), but links to spammy MP3 download sites, and so on, that’s just bad.

And, don’t think that the authors don’t realize that.  If you try to look through the code for those links, it’s not there… how can that be? Well, what they tend to do is encrypt the links in the footer so that you can’t find them there.  And of course, that makes it harder to take them out.

Some developers have taken to hijacking the 404 page of ‘free’ themes with redirects, which then transfers page equity over to the developer’s site. Very sneaky, and not something that you’ll necessarily notice unless you go looking for it.

Now, on the other hand, there are plenty of free things that are worthwhile, with anything open source being a great example of communities banding together to create content and tools for each other.

So, what I’m saying here, is be careful.  Make sure to look at what you’re getting to make sure there are no surprises, after all…

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.