Daisy Whitney gave two examples of companies shifting from a free to paid model. I agree that “training the customers early to pay” is good advice, but I also like other model… give it away for free, then offer meaningful upsells. For instance, I’d probably pay for Tubemogul because it saves me the hassle of visiting a number of online sites to distribute and track my videos. Likewise, I just upped my YouSendIt account to a monthly fee… it’s got a 2 GB limit (and I was always just a little to bloated for the free one), and it remembers my e-mails.
So yes “train customers early to pay” but “free” is a good marketing tool. The trick is to develop value-add additions once you have a regular user base. Oh- and note Daisy’s focus is on B2B.
Charging for online-video content is not a good idea right now unless you’ve got INCREDIBLE content and a major following.
I love YouSendIt too…Totally worth the price…good point on free as a marketing tool..The key is to NOT give your service away for too long…use it to get people interested, liking it, loving it…then see if you can convert them to paid customers…
I disagree that people will not categorically pay for online-video content.
People pay all the time for commercials messages or ads that find a balance between what the video creator wants to say and what the brand wants to say.
That market exists today and is keen to find new content all the time.
Does Daisy pay you to put her on your blog or is it just an obsession you have?
isn’t this what cubebreak did?
I didn’t read beyond the title
Did she say the video was presented by “NAPPY” or did I hallucinate that? LOL