Welcome to the freemium wiki

Wikipedia quotes venture capitalist Fred Wilson as being the first to articulate the freemium business model in 2006.

"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."

This definition is derived from the business models of skype and flickr among others. They offer an Internet service for free and a premium service that you have to pay for. Until know this model has been mostly used for online businesses. The scope of this wiki is also online businesses, but mainly the use of this model in non-online businesses.


Freemium has emerged because the increasingly inexpensive cost of computing and internet distribution. This technology has created a new economic paradigm of non scarcity. Within this paradigm new business models has emerged, one of which is freemium. The business model first emerged within the IT business. Recently it has started to spread to a range of other industries. The main focus of this wiki is freemium outside the IT industry, without necessarily excluding this business area


In order to facilitate the examination of these business models, the goal of this wiki is to assemble information, tools and best practice examples.

Best Practise

Here you can find a range of case studies and a comprehensive overview of the tendencies.

Information and media

Here you can find more detailed explanation of the different aspects of this business model, as well as links to interesting videos, articles and blog posts.

Tools

Here you can find tool that can help you, if you are examinating the freemium model

About freemium

The context of freemium business model

Best practise examples of freemium business models

Resources to explore the use of freemium

Links, blogs, and books

Creating this wiki

Directories for free content and products

Conversion percentage

Network

Unless otherwise stated, the content of this page is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License