one of my favorite slides in david gillespie’s wonderful digital strangelove presentation
Rafer sez:
It’s specifically a great tactic for startups selling analytics. Those startups spend time belaboring which stats should be free and which premium, and it’s almost always a waste. Give away a full report once a day (or week), and charge the premium for continuous updating.
Freemium is not a one-size-fits-all business model for applications. Take our flagship Twitter application JournoTwit - there are several features in the pipeline which (if you’re a journalist) will rock your world. We will almost certainly not charge journalists (individually) any money for access to these premium features because we would sooner work with publications to create something bespoke.
The market for Twitter applications is huge but saturated with generic players like Tweetdeck, the focus of strategy is to grow an enormous herd of users in order to become a platform on which people can be targeted. I would like to see more development begin by targeting niche audiences and customising the experience for certain verticals. After all, what use is a real-time and social internet if business is unable to grasp the relevance.
