Freemium is not a new concept

Posted by Tom Blue on March 10, 2009 under Uncategorized | Be the First to Comment

I have seen a lot of people on Twitter discussing Freemium and how it should be the business model of the web future…   I also noticed this article byJeff Tinsley.  For those of you don’t know, freemium is basically a business model that focuses part of its revenue(and/or marketing) on free services/information and part of its revenue from a premium subscription.

There has been a lot of discussion about this type of model in the past few years and it seems it is at a peak right now, but it is a very old model and concept.    Hoovers.com has been giving away bits of information online since 1995 while some customers opted for a more detailed subscription.  My company, Lead411, has been doing the same since 2001.

Even before the web, magazines would offer some people free subscriptions so that more eyeballs were viewing their ads.

This is not an old concept, people are just just changing their focus because all of the sudden they realize they can’t survive on just ad revenue during bad times.