Tres formas de “gratis”
Categoría: Análisis, Featured
Chris Anderson divide los productos que son “gratis” en tres grupos: los subsidios cruzados, la publicidad y el “freemium”.
One of the themes of the book is untangling the confusion over different kinds of free,which can range from a simple marketing gimmick to a radically new economic model. I’ve taken a quick pass at doing this visually, but we’ll really have to pretty these diagrams up (perhaps with cute restroom-style figures for the various parties, rather than the Ps and Cs below?)
Here’s the first, which dates back more than a century. It’s the razors-and-blades model, as well as loss leaders of all sorts, from “free gift inside” to “free toaster for opening an account”:
The second is the media business model, ranging from free-to-air broadcast radio and television to all ad-supported content online today:
The third is the new one, enabled by digital markets where the marginal cost of production and distribution is close to zero. This is the one that allows the “freemium” business model, where 90% of the users get the basic product for free and 10% chose to pay for a premium version. In economics this is called “versioning” and is a form of using price discrimination (where the main price is zero) to maximize both the consumer utility and the profit in a market. In this model, charging a small percentage of a large user base beats charging a large percentage of a small user base. Obviously best for consumer products with potentially large appeal, it’s the main Web 2.0 business model and can be found everywhere from Flickr and Flickr Pro to open source’s “support included” commercial versions of Linux.
