Free based business models
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Do We Expect Too Much For Free?
I know, it’s shocking. A newspaper, of which precious few remain, wants to make enough money to continue to deliver world-famous reporting. What was it thinking?Seth's Blog: The free market
Companies that operate in a free market generally work as hard as they can to make that market not free. By creating lock in, monopolies, patent protection, long term contracts, chasms in pricing and other barriers to entry, companies profit out of proportion to their risk or investment. That's their job. Acting on their own behalf, self-interested companies will almost always work to make the playing field unlevel, to create loopholes and to generate barriers that keep the market unfree.
The real cost of free | Cory Doctorow | Technology | guardian.co.uk
Last week, my fellow Guardian columnist Helienne Lindvall published a piece headlined The cost of free , in which she called it "ironic" that "advocates of free online content" (including me) "charge hefty fees to speak at events". Lindvall says she spoke to someone who approached an agency I once worked with to hire me for a lecture and was quoted $10,000-$20,000 (£6,300-£12,700) to speak at a college and $25,000 to speak at a conference. Lindvall goes on to talk about the fees commanded by other speakers, including Wired editor Chris Anderson, author of a book called "Free" ( which I reviewed here in July 2009 ), Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde and marketing expert Seth Godin. In Lindvall's view, all of us are part of a united ideology that exhorts artists to give their work away for free, but we don't practice what we preach because we charge so much for our time.
Free based business models - Opportunity
Switching Costs
I wonder if having a high switching cost is the evil twin of the freemium customer acquisition model. It’s alter ego. If you can’t get one, you have to have the other.
- "l'absence de coûts marginaux" qui permet, par exemple, à des groupes de donner leur musique en ligne afin d'attirer des spectateurs à leurs concerts Vous l'aurez compris rien n'est totalement gratuit et même plus l'altruisme, désormais également valorisé. Mais là aussi, ne soyons pas naïfs, l'altruisme des entreprises se valorisaient déjà dans l'image de marque et donc dans le bilan-même de l'entreprise. Ce qui va changer, c'est pour l'altruisme de tout un chacun : de nouveaux sites Web voient en effet le jour et créent des sortes d'économies parallèles et parfaites. Elles reposent sur un système de communauté, avec une monnaie d'échange transparente qui permet à ceux qui apportent des compétences ou de l'immatériel de la valoriser et d'acheter des biens matériels (et réciproquement). Les deux nouveaux sites emblématiques qui illustrent cette lame de fond : Easyswap ( via Kashklash ) et OurNexChange ( via Worldchanging ) :
La fin du gratuit et le nouveau contrat économique
Freemium business models seem to be gaining in popularity and rapidly becoming a dominant factor in the success of Web startups . Massively successful social-gaming companies like Zynga and Playdom have had a role in driving their adoption. These companies have been able to grow quickly and make substantial revenues through a combination of ad sales and charging small amounts of money for additional game items and features. Freemium is a business model that provides users with free access to a service’s core functionality, but charges for additional or improved features. In social gaming, this often takes the form of letting players purchase special, limited-edition virtual goods using an in-game, virtual currency. Other Web services allow users to purchase a premium user experience.
Getting the most out of the freemium model
The 3 Keys to Success with Freemium
Freemium is a difficult business model to execute but can create a valuable, sustainable company when things go well. I helped to conceive of and execute the freemium business model at LogMeIn , which is now valued at over $800m. Since then I’ve helped optimize the model at another 14 startups including Dropbox , Xobni , Eventbrite , Lookout , Webs , Wordpress.com , etc. Through these roles I’ve discovered the following three elements always seem to be present with successful freemium businesses:
How to Ride the Freemium App Wave to Success : Tech News «
The freemium mobile app movement is now a full-fledged trend among consumers. For developers, it’s a lucrative one. As I wrote about recently, one-third of the top-grossing iPhone apps are freemium programs that cost nothing to play but make their money primarily through in-app purchases of additional content or functionality. Remco van den Elzen, co-founder of analytics firm Distimo, said he believes in-app purchases now represent about 30 percent of all iPhone App Store revenue.
Kevin Kelly on how to sell free
The question of whether access or ownership is more important was directly addressed — and answered — by Kevin Kelly , senior maverick at Wired magazine, during his keynote speech at TOC 2011 . In no uncertain terms he said access was the future: There's this huge shift we see in the entire environment where people get more value out of having access to something rather than owning it. With Netflix, you don't own the movies, you just have access to them — Spotify, Pandora, and Last FM are music streams that go by; you don't actually own the music, you just access it ...
Sun, 08 Nov 2009 00:46:19 “ Priced and Unpriced Online Markets ” by Harvard Business School professor Benjamin Edelman. Discusses tradeoffs in market such as email, IP addresses, search and dial-up Internet. “Reminiscent of the old adage about losing money on every unit but making it up in volume, online markets challenge norms about who should pay, when, and why.” I found this typically academic: dated, dry and pretty unilluminating.
The Long Tail
Editor’s note: This post was written by Alex Rampell , the CEO of TrialPay . Rampell is a regular contributor to TechCrunch – see his previous guest posts here. The 1980s and 1990s witnessed the slow death of the “mom and pop” general store, replaced by superstores like Walmart that sold everything from butter to guns . Regardless of one’s position on this trend, it makes classic economic sense: by buying in bulk, Walmart commands better prices with suppliers, and then passes on lower prices to consumers. (Walmart has even been accused of “predatory” pricing to drive mom and pop stores out of business, raising prices after their disappearance.) By aggregating every product under the sun, Walmart can lure consumers in to buy staples (sometimes sold at/below cost), and cross-sell them other impulse items.
Bye Bye, Long Tail
Par Daniel Kaplan le 22/01/09 | 24 commentaires | 8,395 lectures | Impression “ Le futur du business, c’est de vendre moins de chaque produit, mais plus de produits diférents ” : cette affirmation centrale de la théorie de la Longue traîne a décidément du mal à résister au test de la réalité. Sur certains marchés tels que celui de la musique en ligne, la théorie apparaît carrément fausse. Sur d’autres, par exemples celui de la vente en ligne de DVD, on constate un effet “longue traîne”, mais si faible qu’il ne peut entraîner aucune modification du fonctionnement du marché – sans parler d’un quelconque effet positif sur la diversité culturelle. Faut-il, alors, enterrer la Longue Traîne et son héraut Chris Anderson ?
Que faire de la “longue traîne” ?
Visualizing Chris Anderson's "Free" Model
Chris Anderson, author of the Long Tail, put out a call for help to visualize his "3 Kinds of Free" model. The above visual is what I've come up with. If you know Chris, can you give him a heads up?Les 4 business model du web basés sur la gratuité
Après avoir réalisé une illustration de 3 business models basés sur la gratuité, David Armano a mis à jour son graphique pour y ajouter une 4ème méthode : offrir du contenu gratuit et y gagner en réputation.. Voilà donc l’illustration complèteFree customer value