Recently I've gotten an increase in the number of emails that more or less say “Hey, why didn't you post X?” and thus I thought I'd take a moment to address this.
The freebie isn't free. There's shipping. Or a minimum purchase. Or an “identification check” via your credit card. Or any number of other strings that are attached to freebies which make them not worth our while. This doesn't mean I won't post something that isn't 100% free, but it is the first bar that an offer generally has to cross in order for me to even consider it on the site.
The freebie stinks. Seriously, who wants a DVD for vacationing in Montana just because it's free? Anybody even remotely interested in that would have already Googled for it instead of waiting for a freebie site to post it.
I can't confirm the freebie isn't spam. This tends to be the case when a bunch of other freebie sites post a freebie while I hold off on it. Sometimes the freebie ends up being legit and people send in “see, I told you so!” messages. But these situations are the exception to the norm and I'm willing to sacrifice posting them in order to make sure the spam is kept out too.
The freebie is only available locally. It's great that your locally owned and operated batting cages or auditorium is giving away free tickets, but I can't post the offers if it'll only benefit 0.001% of Hiffers out there. If I posted each local offer I discovered, I'd never sleep. These are better suited for the forums, not the main page of the site. The added benefit of posting them there is that anybody can add a freebie, meaning far more local offers are bound to show up.
There are only a few samples available. I won't even consider posting any freebie with a supply that's under 1,000. Anything under 10,000 depends on outside factors, like when it first became available and how many other freebie sites I've seen it on. Companies are notorious for leaving up their submission forms well after they've run out of supplies. It's not uncommon for me to find an offer that has, say, 25,000 samples, only for me to later dig up a press release that shows the offer was released in 2007. There's no way that freebie is showing up and so why waste our collective time in posting it?
There are other uncommon reasons why I won't post something, but you get the gist.
