Apr
5
2009
Are you – or your competitors – going to be first to offer freemiums?
Author: Robin BrowneI first heard the term freemium in a talk by Gary Vaynerchuk of the very successful Wine Library TV. The concept is simple: give away some stuff for free and sell premium stuff. It’s what Wired editor Chris Anderson’s upcoming book Free is all about. Vaynerchuk does it by offering great wine advice in his videocast for free and selling wine.
This week I heard about two more very different freemium examples. The Guardian newspaper, always on the cutting edge of great thought, is now also on the freemium cutting edge. The paper recently announced it’s making all its content available for free via a system similar to the iPhone in terms of letting people create applications using Guardian content. For example, someone could create an application that takes all the Guardian stories on international crime and mashes them up with Google Maps to create a map of international crime centres. The money part is the Guardian will eventually require people to carry ads from the Guardian’s adverstising clients. It’s a brilliant way to spread the Guardian’s content far and wide – and keep monetizing it.
The other example is the mashup music artist Girl Talk who I wrote about in a recent post about the movie Rip: A Remix Manifesto. Like the innovative British band, Radiohead, Girl Talk’s album is available for download off Girl Talk’s MySpace page – for as much as you want to pay. The freemium is that if you pay a little more you get a little more. Any price grants the download of the entire album as high-quality mp3s, $5 or more adds the options of FLAC files , plus a one-file seamless mix of the album and $10 or more includes all of the above plus a packaged CD when available.
Freemiums are the future. Will you or your competitors get there first?
