FREE is definitely the most loved word over the internet. It’s a matter of facts. If you search for “free” on Google, you get over 1.7 billions hits… while “sex” only about 650 millions. Impressive.
Why is this word so popular ? It’s an old story. First of all, let’s talk about internet access. In Europe the “free”losophy started with Freeserve and Tiscali on 1998, which were offering free internet dialup access where you only paid for your modem traffic.
It has been a real boom. Everyone started accessing internet since they paid only if they used it. And it was cheap, just the cost of a local call.
Then, this word has been used to refer to many services that portals (usually ISPs) started offering to their internet users. Why ? Users got a free service but ISPs and portals could make advertisers pay.
Then it was VoIP’s turn. On September 2000, my company started offering a free PC to phone service (Chocophone) to Italy. Our users only had to watch audio/video advertisements. There were some limitations, but it worked for a while. On 2001 we could cover costs for over 300K users using that service. Not bad. Unfortunately internet advertising started to decline, so we moved to other business models.
Where are we now? VoIP rates are falling to 0 and others are starting offering free VoIP services to their users, where advertisement will be the core business. In addition, someone who watch this market from the customer perspective states that free calls are the killer app for VoIP.
My opinion ? Over the internet, users still want as much as possible for FREE. Even with VoIP-related value added services, to create a real business around them you need a huge user base, otherwise the small percentage of people willing to pay for them is not enough to sustain your business.
So, where is the money? We need to focus on products like ones described here. It can be a real bargain for us who work in this market and for final users. Not easy to do, of course, but it’s worth it.
Technorati Tags: FREE, free voip, luca filigheddu, marketing
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