Thanks to Stowe Boyd for the tip on Fred Wilson’s post about the Freemium business model. Fred is evangelizing the term for the business model that he described as such:
He calls it Freemium based on comments he received from his readers. Credit for the term goes to Jarid Lukin from Alacra.
We are on board. KMM founders have lived this model in the past. Over 18 months starting in 1998, we built a free web hosting community called freeservers.com. It grew organically through word of mouth to more than one million enthusiastic users. We never spent any money on promotional dollars and initially we generated some revenue through run-of-network advertising. In 1999, About.com acquired our company and it continued to grow. Over the next few years, premium subscriptions became a focus. Today, freeservers is in the family of United Online properties including netzero and juno. Most of its revenue comes from upgrades to premium services from the free web hosting offer.
So Freemium it is........and we agree that Freemium is a dreamium. It is also our plan for Know More Media-um.
"Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base."
He calls it Freemium based on comments he received from his readers. Credit for the term goes to Jarid Lukin from Alacra.
We are on board. KMM founders have lived this model in the past. Over 18 months starting in 1998, we built a free web hosting community called freeservers.com. It grew organically through word of mouth to more than one million enthusiastic users. We never spent any money on promotional dollars and initially we generated some revenue through run-of-network advertising. In 1999, About.com acquired our company and it continued to grow. Over the next few years, premium subscriptions became a focus. Today, freeservers is in the family of United Online properties including netzero and juno. Most of its revenue comes from upgrades to premium services from the free web hosting offer.
So Freemium it is........and we agree that Freemium is a dreamium. It is also our plan for Know More Media-um.
Posted by: Melonie K. Murray | March 29, 2006 4:52 PM | Permalink to Comment