If you live under a rock, like myself, you probably missed a fun new word and the evolving business model “Freemium.” Wiki says this fancy word was ‘articulated’ back in March of 2006.

Source: Wikipedia “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.”

In short, Freemium is when you give away something for free, normally the main product. Then offer some type of up sell or expanded product at a premium price. Free + Premium, simple as that.

A direct and probably crazy method of this would be to open a Paysite Members Area to the world, no access restrictions, totally free for all visitors. The visitor can then be up sold on other site features, like broadband movies, extra plugins content, whatever extra features that can be sold at a premium price.

Another example of a type of Freemium Marketing would be myfreepaysite.com. This is a monstrous free subscription site, which really doesn’t contain a free front end but the backend subscription is totally free. Free members are given a great deal of real free content but with this includes a massive amount of up sell content and advertisements to just about every major adult product in the business.

Some mainstream companies that following a stronger Freemium Model would include di.fm (love it), Skype, Yahoo Music (great service), Flickr LiveJournal, Trillian, Linux (use it),  and way more than I’m going to list.

This is pretty much how the entire Free Porn traffic base works. From Piracy, Members, and Webmaster Promo Content, all aspects of our Industry have flooded the Internet with millions of free pictures and free movies. This has created a massive base of free porn seeking surfers, that every day seek out freebies and get up sold to the promoted site or related products at a rather steep premium price.

The Adult Industry is a global Freemium Market. Interesting Theory at least. Your Thoughts?

~TheDoc

This article is related to my recent post: Maybe Tube Sites Aren’t As Big As You Think
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