Freemium Blog

“With new business models, businesses can increase their profits from sharing with Creative Commons.” “By illustrating the financial potential, Creative Commons’ advocates can help increase the number of people using the license.” Creative Commons Business Models View more presentations from Peter Froberg. Sharing knowledge does not impoverish the giver, in fact sharing knowledge, culture, and information is not only good for the receiver but it also nurtures creativity, innovation, and helps solve a host of global problems. ... Read More

As mentioned earlier, the freemium conversion rate is a poor measure of success or potential. The BBC dot.life blog tells the story of the evernote model. “..so about 1.5% are choosing to pay - that doesn’t sound a very cheerful state of affairs. But Phil Libin came charging back with a series of spreadsheets and graphs telling a more encouraging story.” There are two main points that need to be included to create a better picture of evernotes freemium model. 1 The cost Evernote has costs as low as nine cents per free user, which ... Read More

Flat world knowledge is not quite profitable with a conversion rate of 65% and ironically yousendit makes financial sense with a conversion rate of a mere 3% The fact of the matter is that comparing freemium success just on the basis of conversion rates does not make much sense. At best it is an arbitrary number like the number of units sold. Only when other variables are taken into account does it make sense. As in the retail model, no one would be influenced by looking at the units sold by the competitors unless other variables like price ... Read More

A short video case study of Flat World Knowledge and their business model A few weeks ago I did a video interview with Eric Frank from Flat World Knowledge. I tried doing it as an video interview, but the quality ended up being to poor to use. For this reason I have been thinking a bit about how best to precent this and future case studies. I decided to use the Flat World Knowledge case as the first, in a database of case studies within freemium business model. The format of the entries in this data base will be: a little text, a short video ... Read More

An economic argument for sharing knowledge with those around you. Recently I had a talk with an acquaintance who is working on creating a network in a very specialized technical niche. The challenge is to create a network where the participants can meet, interact, share their knowledge and not just exchange pleasantries and drink coffee. Personally I was fascinated by the challenges and efforts involved in this endeavor. Hypothetically if we both posses an apple each and give them to each other then we will still have one apple each. ... Read More

Through Duncan’s blog I found this new website and business model for poetry. Based on letting users read and listen to poetry read buy the author. They then sell MP3 downloads and texts of those poems. This is a classical freemium model as it has been seen in a lot of other areas. Someone might think that it could be difficult to sell a download when it is available for free. Yet this is something that the success of Nine inch nails, Ghosts I-IV proved possible. It will be very interesting to follow the progress of this site. I have asked ... Read More

In this great short video, Mike Masnick of Techdirt gives an introduction to the Economics of Abundance. Faced with digital production, some goods are no longer scares and their price will gravitate towards zero. This is not necessarily a bad thing because the abundant supply of some goods will open op for the sale of other scares goods. This is the underlying principle of freemium. Via ... Read More

Common craft makes excellent instructional videos that are widely popular. The basic versions of these videos are freely available on their website and on YouTube. However, they make a living by selling high definition versions that are used in business and educational settings. If you do not know them yet then this video “RSS in Plain English” is an example of their work. I have been a fan of their work and business model for some time now. So, after I saw a blog post from Lee LeFever in which he explained their business model, I decided ... Read More

(The following is a guestpost by Dan Holloway) Why market share for market share’s sake isn’t the dirty idea we all think it is The mistake most failed Internet start-ups made at the height of the dot com boom is that they grabbed market share at the expense of revenue. They went and grabbed customers by offering prices for what they did that were slashed, in most cases to zero. And they could afford to do so for two connected reasons. Everyone believed the mantra “money follows market share”. Second, and most important, the people ... Read More

“Sita Sings The Blues” is one movie that is making more money the more it is shared online. This is a great example of Freemium in the film industry. In this video Nina Paley shares her experiences of making “Sita Sings The Blues” available for free. I saw this interesting video through Techdirt and Social Square. Earlier I have written about some other interesting experiments with Freemium in the TV industry e.g. “Dr. Horrible’s Sing along Blog” and “Tiki bar” Nina Paley has offered the movie online for free viewing, ... Read More