Are There Any Decent PLR Products Out There? [5 Reasons You Shouldn’t Take Them Seriously]

I personally think the "PLR industry" (if we can call it so) is helplessly old-fashioned, it makes no one happy. PLR products are mass-produced and the majority of them are of inferior quality. Once you own one, you can sell it for any price you want, or give it away for free as part of a bonus or membership. So there's no point for the developers in trying to provide good quality in the first place if they're circulated for free, anyway. Are there ever, any decent PLR products out there?

PLR, MR, and RR

"PLR products" are often used for specific purposes by online marketers but each product has a different type of license, so let's recap the differences in between.

PLR (Private Label Rights)

When a product has private label rights attached to it, generally you can do anything with it. You can edit the content, change the package design in any way you want, and claim authorship as if you developed the product. You can also resell it as it is, and whoever buys it from you may also hold the same rights.

Obviously, you cannot change the license status such as to claim the copyright of the product, and other restrictions may vary from product to product. For example, you may or may not be allowed to give away for free.

MRR (Master Resell/Resale Rights)

MRRs are similar to PLRs except that you cannot modify any part of the product nor claim authorship. But the license status can be extended to others - whoever buys it from you will also hold MRR, which means they'll have a right to sell it to others.

Master Resell Rights are by far the most popular form of license that you find in what we generally call "PLR products", i.e. many of them don't actually have a PLR license but they have an MRR license. You are often allowed to;

• sell them
• give away as a bonus with other products you sell, or
• give away to your "members only"

But not to give away to the public for free.

RR (Resale Rights)

A product with resale rights can be sold as it is, but the license cannot be passed on, so whoever buys it from you is not allowed to resell it or give away for free.

Problems with PLR Products

Products with any of these licenses are convenient especially for a new online marketing hopeful who has yet to find things to sell. These products - ebooks and software - are often used as "lead magnets", given away in exchange for signing up. It's good to have some stuff to give away without putting any effort on your part...at least it appears to be. But there are some disadvantages of buying and using PLR (, MRR and RR) products.

#1 The Quality Is Low

Whether it's an ebook, video package, or software, it's made modifiable and resellable for a reason. Because the original creator is not getting any credit for it, they seem to have no reason to make an effort to create the best quality. 

Most PLR ebooks are general guides, the content is deliberately stretched and unnecessarily lengthy. They're also often sold as a resale package, containing a sales page, banners, "mindmap" and so on in a zip file. But they're created using an outdated PLR package generator, so the graphics are often poor quality and the sales pages are too shabby, non-mobile responsive, and unusable.

#2 License Status May Be Unreliable

Whether a product has private label rights or master resell rights is often not clear. Quite often, I've seen the same products with a different license attached - sold by two different sites, exactly the same package content except the license information; one said PLR, the other one said MRR. The "licenses" are not sealed, dated, or approved by a particular recognized body. They are repeatedly sold from one hand to another over time and, I guess along the way, someone sneakily tampers with the license information. The originators don't really care about that, either.

#3 Creator Unknown = Unreliable

Basically, PLR products are used by marketers for marketing purposes; you get them from "wholesalers" and sell them or give them away to those who don't know what PLRs are. The problem is, hardly any of them are credible because MRR/RR products don't display the creator's information, while anyone can claim the authorship of PLR products, meaning the same product can be sold under different names.

#4 Too Many Outdated Products

Many wholesaler sites make thousands of PLR products available to download for a monthly membership fee so that the members - who are marketers - can choose the right ones to distribute. But of course, only so many new products are released each month and, the majority of the stock is a few years+ old or even over a decade old. The information written in an old ebook is often out-of-date, graphics can be old-fashioned, and software can be unusable because of again, an outdated script used. 

#5 Misused By Others

This is related to the licensing issue mentioned in #2 above, but the exact content of a PLR ebook can often be found online. Because some website owners copy the entire content from top to bottom and publish it on their website as if they've written it. The same content can be found on multiple sites and, of course it's not doing the site owners any favor because a copied content can only be penalized by search engines.

But from a user's point of view, it's the annoying fact that the ebook they decide to sell or use as a bonus gift may already be published on a webpage elsewhere.

Where Should You Get PLR Products, If At All?

If you're looking to buy some PLR products for whatever reason, there are a few things that I can suggest you do;

• Don't be swayed by an amazing title (product name). A great title doesn't mean the product is of good quality. Some PLR wholesaler sites let you preview, so can check the content first and only buy the one you feel happy with.
• Quickly google search the product name - it may be available cheaper or even free elsewhere.
• Also google search to see the release date of the product. Any software that's more than a couple of years old may be useless and depending on the niche, ebooks may have outdated information.
• Quality over quantity - avoid buying an extreme bargain package, such as hundreds of PLR products for a one-off fee of $10. The majority of them is likely to be of inferior quality, old, or in the wrong niche.