A winning strategy to monetize climbing videos ?

Dear videomakers,

I found an interesting article with an advice that maybe can be useful for You.

Here the full referred video (I suggest You to skip the part before 2.12 min):

And here text transcription for the parts most significant for me:

" Give For Free Instead of Charging Money

I think that the winning strategy for such a movie is the one of not holding anything, but really giving out fully this movie as a present.

... My advice is:
let that information go, make it fully available, put that two hours on YouTube, on whichever platform is needed.
It doesn't matter what's the name, but put it out there in as many places as possible, in full.
It may not be the greatest quality, it may not look as good as in the DVD, but that's all perfectly fine, because you want your message to go out there.

And you know what?
The beautiful thing that will happen if you do this, is that people will buy your DVD in numbers that are orders of magnitude greater than if you just sold it and promote it with a few clips here and there, a few nice trailers.

People are going to pick up just the trailers and go away with a little insight you share inside the trailers.
They're not going to check the DVD because to see the DVD they have to do some effort, they have to pay some money, they have to send you the money, you have to send the DVD and all this.
And very very few people will do it.
Possibly the people who already know about your work, or are very specifically interested about it for some other reason.

But if you really want to get the highest number of sales out there, you have to listen to what Paulo Coehlo and other big book best-sellers, writers out there, are saying.
Which is:
it doesn't matter how many free copies are circling out there, or better yet, it actually matters, how many free, pirated copies are out there, because the more there are out there, the more people will buy your original version.

It just happens that if there's the free version, I go look at it, and then I say: "Oh, did you see this movie? Let me send you the link, I would like you to check it out!", and I send it to my best friends and some of them will send it to their best friends.

Sharing May Be The Marketing of the Future

When you like something, you want to reciprocate, you want to give it out as a present to other people, you want to own it in some way so that you feel even more gratified, you want to see it in high quality and invite friends to watch it on the big screen in your living room.

All of this will happen if people can appreciate the beauty that is in the movie.
But if you create a beautiful movie, a beautiful something, and you just give little bits of it, and say: "Well, if you want it all, buy it".
I don't think is going to work.

Unless you've given out already a lot before and people know exactly the type of value you're going to give out in there, or, I don't know, unless you let them see what's out there.

I think that there are enough proofs out there that this can be a winning strategy.
I know it's very hard to swallow, I know that many partners are not going to be liking this idea at all, but I needed, as I'm an explorer of how to use new media solutions, with all the limitations and mistakes that I make, I do like to state my own vision on this.

I think the vision for the future, for whoever is in your same position, is to let this thing go out for free, as much as possible, maybe in lower quality than normally would be, and that will do your marketing. "

Maybe Robin is right, if I see Big Up Productions experience ...

Here You can find another interesting point of view:

" ...
So either you buy advertising and marketing ($$$$$), or you give stuff out free and hope that lots of people like it and tell their friends, and eventually you get something like a network effect.

Just look at the popular music and books out there. A some of them aren't really that good - it's just they are good (lucky? ;) ) enough, and then people talk about them and it becomes part of their shared experience, and so some of them will buy for themselves or for others.

Note though, if you can only create one decent work in your entire life, then giving away that only golden egg you lay isn't going to make you much money. But that just means you're not very good at that, and you should be finding a different way of earning a living.

If I can only paint one excellent picture in my whole lifetime, I shouldn't try to make money as an artist. Maybe just paint as a hobby. "

And You ?
Which is Your opinion about this ?

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