To me, this is the most important point about a freemium business model… the cost of developing and rolling out the free version should be treated as a marketing cost that can eventually set the stage for introduction of premium upgrades down the line. | Instead of spending large amounts of money on marketing that tells people about a product, create a community of free users and create evangelists in the process.Read more at www.techcrunch.com |
I recommend reading the entire post by @alexiskold - an excellent analysis of the recent debate around whether free can work as a business model. Below are two instances when free works (both are very much on the table with Amplify)… | The first instance is the service or software that offers a free trial and then converts users into paying customers. |
Though it’s taken me a number of years to actually practice this discipline, i have always believed that simple, narrowly defined user experiences are prerequisites for building something big. Google, twitter and amazon are great examples of that. | Evolution is not merely a theory for Amazon; it’s part of its intelligent design. Originating as a single-cell online bookseller in July 1995, Amazon has, over its 14-year history, developed into a monstrous cybermall, offering millions of products and accumulating a market capitalization north of $34 billion. It peddles everything from music, movies, and video games to apparel, gadgets, gardening tools, lab equipment, health and beauty aids, even sex toys and the bonglike “mini hookah.” Read more at www.fastcompany.com |
How exciting…we haven’t reached out seeking coverage, yet coverage is finding us - so cool!! | There are three features that make Amplify the better choice for clipping, in our opinion: Twitter sharing, of course, but also groups and the ability to share from RSS. The groups feature lets multiple users from a business, organization, class, etc. create a community site to which they all contribute. |
Thus far we’ve been keeping a farily low profile, grinding through the normal kicks and starts that come with a new service in beta. To see Stowe Boyd find our service (thanks to @cleverclogs) and begin using it is a great thrill!! On his blog post you’ll see Stowe has a number of suggestion on how to improve Amplify as well as my comments on how/when we intend to address them.
We haven’t been seeking out the reviews, but nice to see Amplify getting noticed. I clipped this paragraph because it speaks to one of the reasons we created Amplify as a separate service from Clipmarks. We really didn’t want to disturb the user experience or community on Clipmarks.com, but we wanted a way to better support Twitter and Facebook users as well as groups. We felt the best way to do this would be to create Amplify as a separate service from Clipmarks, but giving Clipmarks users the option to sync the two. | In a way, Amplify is what I had hoped Clipmarks would be: in addition to giving you an easy way to take entire clippings of the Web that you can return to and review later, the service allows you to share those interesting tidbits with the world. This way you give other people a way to interact with you, comment on your clippings, and see what you’re reading on the Web that you think is interesting and worth sharing. Since Amplify allows you to hook into your Twitter or Facebook account, the service doesn’t have to compete with those networks for attention and can compliment them instead.Read more at www.appscout.com |
This review did a really good job tapping into the purpose of Amplify. I particularly like this excerpt as it hones in on our desire to give people a platform for not just sharing links on twitter, but for expressing their points of view with each other without the limitation of 140 characters. Just imagine that you read something online and you have a great idea but you are alone. In that case you can use this solution to talk about it with others and share not only the article but also your feelings about it. The main purpose behind this idea was to create productive connections that would have an important effect over the way people communicate.
Read more at www.killerstartups.com |
| Technology is all well and good, but at some point one must go from “Look at this cool thing we’ve designed!” to “Look at all the money we’re making from this cool thing!”Read more at gigaom.com |
This is an important concept for us to consider with Amplify. Good find Brin. |
Ad Revenue on the Web? No Sure Bet
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SAN FRANCISCO — For anyone with a crazy idea for a Web business, the way to make it pay was once obvious: get a lot of visitors and sell ads. Since 2004, venture investors have put $5.1 billion into 828 Web start-up companies, and most of them are supported by ads, according to the National Venture Capital Association. |
Now advertisers have cut back their online spending. So Web start-ups are searching for new ways to make money, like selling real, or virtual, goods or asking customers to buy subscriptions. |
The market consultants at eMarketer say that while ad growth online has slowed from its 20 percent to 30 percent growth rates, it still grew 10.6 percent last year and is expected to expand 4.5 percent this year. And while advertisers are expected to spend less on display, classified and e-mail ads, they will spend more on search and video ads. Read more at www.nytimes.com |
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A critical point about freemium
