Archive for June, 2009
A subversive approach to building on-line communities.
The concept of charging users for an on-line community platform is quite a departure from the conventional preachings of the internet. ‘Freemium models’ are most often dismissed as an overreaching effort to increase revenues. But there are a few good reasons why I strongly feel a freemium model would work better.
One of the toughest challenges in building and sustaining an on-line community is establishing trust among users who have never met in the real world. Most users are wary of false identities and this inhibits the formation of trusted interpersonal relationships online. Paid account holders carry a certain level of authenticity and thus establishing mutual trust among such users gets easier.
Charging users creates a decently high barrier to entry and any barrier acts as a filter that ensures a certain quality in content. This also ensures that as a business owner you spend much lesser resource and time on moderating/flagging content to keep the place clean.
And last but not the least, users are not threatened by the possibility of the service shutting down due to unmanageable costs.
More revenues, lesser overheads and better trust – What more do we need to believe in this model?
