I’m surprised to see how the book giveaway is more expensive than the costs of actually placing the ads to get eyes on the sites! Why did you decide to give away a physical book? What do you think the cost-effectiveness of that is compared to ebooks or not having a giveaway?
One relevant thing here is that I’m not thinking about the book giveaway as just (or even primarily) an incentive to get people to view our site — I think most of the value is probably in getting people in our target audience to read the books we give out, because I think the books contain a lot of important ideas. I think I’d be potentially excited about doing this without the connection to 80k at all (though the connection to 80k/incentive to engage with us seems like an added bonus).
Re: physical books versus ebook:
We do offer the ebook for the 80,000 Hours book (which is the most popular book of the three by a long way, taking up over half the orders).
[A quick edit: also, sending ebooks other than the 80,000 Hours book isn’t free — it’d cost something like half to a quarter of the cost of sending a physical book]
My guess is that people are just much more likely to read a physical book than an ebook — it’s cool and exciting to receive a thing in the post, rather than an infinitely replicable digital artefact. Just from personal experience, I’ve had a lot of organisations send me digital books I’ve never read, but I think it’d be much more ‘special’ if I got something in the mail.
This is also a bit more than a guess — I’ve looked at some (old, smaller scale) data from sites where you give out codes to redeem ebooks, and the vast majority of people never redeem them.[1]
Whereas 89% of the people we surveyed who received the book from our book giveaway reported reading at least some of the book (and 38% reported reading the whole thing!)[2]
Edited cos it occured to me that maybe I didn’t really answer your core question here, about cost-effectiveness —
I currently reckon the book giveaway is comparably cost-effective with other things we’ve done, but that’s based on some fairly rough estimates. I didn’t feel very satisfied with them, which is why we did the in-depth survey that I mentioned above. I haven’t finished analysing the results yet, as I said, so I can’t say anything more useful about it for now :)
You should of course adjust down for sampling bias and self-report bias. I haven’t finished analysing our data from this survey yet — it’s hot off the press — so I don’t have a view on how much to adjust down.
Interesting that the 80k book is so popular. Is this the book that came out in late 2016, or has the content been updated? If not, it may be worth doing a second edition, since I assume that 80k’s thinking has evolved significantly since publication.
Yeah, I agree a second edition could be really valuable, and this might be something we end up doing (It’s definitely high up on the list! There are some complications that make it not totally obvious that we’ll be able to do it soon, though).
I’m surprised to see how the book giveaway is more expensive than the costs of actually placing the ads to get eyes on the sites! Why did you decide to give away a physical book? What do you think the cost-effectiveness of that is compared to ebooks or not having a giveaway?
Nice, thanks for your question!
One relevant thing here is that I’m not thinking about the book giveaway as just (or even primarily) an incentive to get people to view our site — I think most of the value is probably in getting people in our target audience to read the books we give out, because I think the books contain a lot of important ideas. I think I’d be potentially excited about doing this without the connection to 80k at all (though the connection to 80k/incentive to engage with us seems like an added bonus).
Re: physical books versus ebook:
We do offer the ebook for the 80,000 Hours book (which is the most popular book of the three by a long way, taking up over half the orders).
[A quick edit: also, sending ebooks other than the 80,000 Hours book isn’t free — it’d cost something like half to a quarter of the cost of sending a physical book]
My guess is that people are just much more likely to read a physical book than an ebook — it’s cool and exciting to receive a thing in the post, rather than an infinitely replicable digital artefact. Just from personal experience, I’ve had a lot of organisations send me digital books I’ve never read, but I think it’d be much more ‘special’ if I got something in the mail.
This is also a bit more than a guess — I’ve looked at some (old, smaller scale) data from sites where you give out codes to redeem ebooks, and the vast majority of people never redeem them.[1]
Whereas 89% of the people we surveyed who received the book from our book giveaway reported reading at least some of the book (and 38% reported reading the whole thing!)[2]
Edited cos it occured to me that maybe I didn’t really answer your core question here, about cost-effectiveness —
I currently reckon the book giveaway is comparably cost-effective with other things we’ve done, but that’s based on some fairly rough estimates. I didn’t feel very satisfied with them, which is why we did the in-depth survey that I mentioned above. I haven’t finished analysing the results yet, as I said, so I can’t say anything more useful about it for now :)
I couldn’t quickly find this data to cite my sources so I can’t be more precise — so don’t put too much stock in my claim here!
You should of course adjust down for sampling bias and self-report bias. I haven’t finished analysing our data from this survey yet — it’s hot off the press — so I don’t have a view on how much to adjust down.
Interesting that the 80k book is so popular. Is this the book that came out in late 2016, or has the content been updated? If not, it may be worth doing a second edition, since I assume that 80k’s thinking has evolved significantly since publication.
It’s the book that came out in late 2016.
Yeah, I agree a second edition could be really valuable, and this might be something we end up doing (It’s definitely high up on the list! There are some complications that make it not totally obvious that we’ll be able to do it soon, though).
I’d look forward to seeing you post the results of the in-depth survey on the forum :-)