The Case for Ungating Everything: Distribution over Collection

In 2011, marketing automation platforms like HubSpot and Marketo convinced the B2B world that the "lead form" was the holy grail of digital business. The playbook was simple. You write a whitepaper. You hide it behind a landing page. You ask for a name, an email, a job title, and a company size. Then, you sit back and watch the "leads" roll in.

It was a beautiful system. It gave marketers a metric they could control. "I generated 500 leads this month," a Director of Demand Gen could proudly tell their boss.

There is only one problem. It is now 2025, and that playbook is dead.

It didn't die because the technology failed. It died because the buyer changed. We have entered the era of the "frictionless consumer." In our personal lives, we get everything instantly. We stream movies on Netflix without waiting. We summon cars with Uber in seconds. We order dinner with a single tap.

Yet, when we go to work and try to research a software solution, we are met with a digital wall. "Want to read our expertise? Please fill out these seven fields and wait for a sales development rep to harass you for the next three weeks."

We hate it. You hate it. I hate it. So why do we still do it?

Why does gating hurt distribution?

The primary currency of the internet is not email addresses. It is attention.

When you gate your content, you are artificially throttling your own reach. You are telling the market, "I only want you to see my best ideas if you are willing to pay me with your data right now."

Let’s look at the math of the gate.

If you have a well-optimized landing page, it might convert at 20% to 30%. That is considered excellent. But flip that metric. It means that 70% to 80% of the people who were interested enough to click on your link arrived at your page, saw the form, and bounced.

You just locked the door on 80% of your potential audience.

These are not just "tire kickers." These are busy executives reading on their phones between meetings. These are researchers doing preliminary scans. These are people who might have shared your article with their boss, but didn't because they couldn't access the PDF without a hassle.

SEO Blindspots

Even worse, you are hiding your content from the most important reader of all: Google.

Search engines cannot fill out forms. When you lock your best thinking inside a PDF that lives behind a gate, that content does not rank. It does not earn backlinks. It does not drive organic traffic.

I worked with a company that produced incredible, 50-page industry reports. They were dense, insightful, and clearly the best data in the market. They gated every single one. Their blog—which was full of fluffy, 500-word SEO bait—got traffic. But their deep expertise, the stuff that proved they were experts, remained invisible to the wider web.

We ran an experiment. We took the "Ultimate Guide to Cloud Security" out from behind the gate. We published it as a massive, open HTML page.

Within two months, traffic to that page increased by 4,000%. It started ranking for high-intent keywords. Other sites started linking to it as a definitive resource. Yes, the direct "leads" from that specific page dropped initially. But the overall domain authority skyrocketed, and the retargeting pool grew by massive factors.

What happens when you remove the gate?

When you ungate everything, you fundamentally change the relationship with your market. You move from a transactional relationship ("Give me data, I give you content") to a relational one ("I give you value, you give me trust").

Your content becomes a liquid asset. It can flow through the market freely.

Trust Velocity

Think about how ideas spread.

Dave Gerhardt at Drift famously killed their lead forms in 2016. They made everything free. You could read their books, watch their videos, and access their guides without giving them a single piece of data.

The result wasn't a lead drought. It was a brand explosion.

People started sharing Drift content in Slack communities. They dropped links in email threads. Marketing managers printed out their "Conversational Marketing Blueprint" and pinned it to office walls. You cannot pin a gated landing page to a wall. This is a perfect example of the Reciprocity Norm: when you give freely, people feel a compulsion to give back (in this case, by evangelizing your brand).

By the time a prospect finally reached out to Drift, they weren't a cold lead. They were a fan. They had consumed hours of content. They understood the philosophy. They didn't need to be "sold" on why Drift mattered; they needed to be helped in buying it.

This is "Trust Velocity." By removing friction, you accelerate the speed at which a prospect trusts you.

How does this impact lead quality?

The terrified objection I hear from every demand gen marketer is: "But my MQL number will crash!"

Yes. It will. And it should.

Your MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead) number is likely inflated with garbage. It is filled with [email protected]. It is filled with students. It is filled with competitors spying on you. It is filled with people who just wanted the PDF and have zero intent to buy.

When you ungate, you stop playing the game of "Lead Capture" and start playing the game of "Demand Generation."

High Intent

A prospect who consumes your content freely, educates themselves, and then clicks the "Book a Demo" button is worth 50 times more than someone who was forced to fill out a form to read a blog post.

This is standard logic for high-ticket sales. If you walk into a luxury watch store, the salesperson does not demand your ID before letting you look at the watches. They let you browse. They answer questions. They treat you with respect. They know that when you are ready, you will initiate the transaction.

Why do we treat B2B software buyers with less respect than a watch buyer?

The Hybrid Approach

If you are still nervous, you don't have to go cold turkey. There is a middle path.

Ungate the consumption, gate the utility.

Let people read the entire guide for free on the website. But if they happen to want a nicely formatted PDF version to email to their team, or an editable spreadsheet template they can use for their own data—that can be gated.

You are trading data for a specific tool, not for general knowledge. The user feels this is a fair trade. "I can read it all here, but the Template saves me time."

This creates a filter. The people who download the template are not just curious; they are practitioners. They are likely in an active project. They are higher quality leads.

The Theory of Zero-Click Content

This movement aligns with what Amanda Natividad at SparkToro calls "Zero-Click Content."

The algorithms of LinkedIn, Twitter, and even Google are increasingly hostile to links that take users off-platform. They want to keep users on their site.

If your strategy is "Tease the value and link to a gated landing page," the algorithm will bury you.

If your strategy is "Give away the value right here in the feed," the algorithm will reward you.

When you ungate your ideas, you can package them natively for every platform. You can post the entire framework on LinkedIn. You can thread the entire argument on Twitter. You can put the whole video on YouTube.

You stop worrying about "Click-Through Rate" and start worrying about "Influence Rate."

The goal of marketing is not to collect email addresses. The goal of marketing is to influence revenue. Sometimes the best way to get the revenue is to stop asking for the email.