Are free reports useful?
Q: Are the free reports that people give out useful?
A: As a general rule, yes, but only somewhat. The "free reports" that Internet marketers give out are almost universally nothing more than cleverly-disguised marketing material for what they're selling. They give you the free report, whet your appetite for their product, then give you the chance to make the purchase.
You can still find some nuggets of use here and there throughout them, though; without at least containing some marginally useful information, nobody would ever read them. Typically the information that you'll find is an excellent overview of a particular subject, with perhaps one or two specific, useful morsels to be found in the document. Most of the real meat on the subject, though, is almost always found in the product that is advertised somewhere in the free report.
As a general rule, there's not much information that you're going to get out of a free report on a subject that you couldn't otherwise get by doing a Google search or spending some time on a marketing forum. Yes, it's conveniently packaged for you and keeps you from having to do any research and read anything that isn't specifically relevant to the topic at hand, but it's still all going to be basic-level information. For the really crunchy bits, you're going to have to do your own extensive research or pony up and buy what they're trying to sell you.
Which was, of course, the whole purpose of distributing the free report in the first place.