Gratis can be a good business. How? Pretty simple: The minority of customers who pay subsidize the majority who do not. Sometimes that’s two different sets of customers, as in the traditional media model: A few advertisers pay for content so lots of consumers can get it cheap or free. The concept isn’t new, but now that same model is powering everything from photo sharing to online bingo. The last decade has seen the extension of this „two-sided market“ model far beyond media, and today it is the revenue engine for all of the biggest Web companies, from Facebook and MySpace to Google itself.
Chris Anderson beschreibt die Economics of Giving It Away im Wall Street Journal (via)
