What is the "Gift Economy"?

Wikipedia says this:

"A gift economy, gift culture, or gift exchange is a mode of exchange where valuables are not traded or sold, but rather given without an explicit agreement for immediate or future rewards."

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Basically, you first give (a product or service) and then let the receiver (customer) decide if and how much they want to give back to you.

So it's not you - the producer/provider/seller of the product who determines the value of the product, but you allow the buyer to determine how valuable your product is to them.

It's very similar to what we're doing here on Steemit - we first provide content and then allow the reader to decide how much of their voting power it is worth to them.

I decided to do an experiment

On my website, I'm offering a guided meditation, and I decided to let people first download it, and later decide if and how much they want to give back.

It's a Receiving Meditation, which I found quite fitting for this experiment.

So, when people come to my website, they can download the mediation for free initially.

Two days later, after they have listened to it at least once (hopefully) they receive an invitation to send a payment in return. How much, is up to them.

This invitation is the only email they receive from me. I do not send reminders after this one. I do not chase them for money. I wouldn't want anyone to feel pressured or spammed by me.

The results have been mixed.

• Only about 25% of the buyers sent a payment afterwards
• Most of them sent the amount I used as an example in my description on the website
• Some paid right away without even having listened to it

The other 75%?
Hard to tell.

• Maybe they forgot. It happens to all of us - we keep putting things off until it's too late.
• Maybe they didn't find it useful. Maybe it had zero value to them. Totally possible.
• Maybe some of them never had any intention to pay. Also possible.

I don't mind. For me, it was important to do this experiment (it's still going on, by the way - you can get the Receiving Mediation here if you want to participate :) )

Also it was more important to me to get this meditation out there, and let people benefit from it, than making a lot of money with it.

But here is the invisible issue...

I think it's wrong to only count the people who downloaded the mediation and then decided to either pay or not.

I believe the largest percentage hesitated to download it in the first place.

I believe many people are overwhelmed with the "future decision" of how much to give back, after they have evaluated the product. They don't want to give too much nor too little. Also, I believe many are scared the seller would judge them if they give less than expected.

I have no expectations and I have no judgment as a seller. If someone sends me $1, it might be because that's all it was worth to them, or it might be that $1 is simply all they have to give right now. Who am I to judge that?

But I get it. Depending on the product or service, I might actually feel the same. In fact, whenever I see someone offering a service on a "Pay What You Want" basis, I often do not take them up on it, because they invested their time. Time is valueable. I am afraid that I might end up finding their service not valuable to me, and wonder how I would compensate them for their time.

Are we ready for a gift economy?

That's the big question.

As a seller, I am totally comfortable offering a product, like my meditation, on a gift economy basis. But I wouldn't do that with a service where I have to invest my time.

As a buyer - if I had to constantly decide how much to pay for everything I ever purchased, I would feel totally overwhelmed with all that decision making.

So, I believe - in general - we can still sell more when we set a fixed price for our products. I probably would sell a lot more of my meditations if I were to do that.

But I'm going to continue the experiment.
Who knows, maybe I will notice a shift over time!

Do you have any gift economy experience outside of Steemit?

What do you think of it?

Would you rather have a fixed price or do you like idea of having the freedom to choose how much you want to pay?

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Hi, I’m Anja :)
I write mostly for women entrepreneurs and support them in managing their money and their business. I have written a Beginner's Guide to Steemit and am building the Conscious Crypto Community.
You can also find me in the Women of Dash group on Slack.