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Ask HN: Writing a master thesis about freemium, need some ideas

11 points by kjbekkelund ↗ HN
The last few years the freemium business model has been talked about and used extensively, but lately companies such as Ning, 37signals, Get Satisfaction and others have started to play down (or remove) their free offering. At the same time, as far as I can see, there have been little mention of this business model in academic articles.

Sachin Rechi (http://www.sachinrekhi.com/blog/2010/02/16/freemium-design-pattern-scale-pricing-with-customer-success) wrote: "I believe we are still early in our understanding of [freemium] models and to date most of the available analysis has been limited to anecdotal evidence, one-off case studies, tips & tricks, and a few early overviews of what’s been tried."

Here are some of the blog posts that inspired me to want to write about freemium: http://www.readwriteweb.com/start/2010/04/is-the-freemium-model-still-viable-for-startups.php, http://37signals.com/svn/posts/2284-eyeballs-still-dont-pay-the-bills, http://www.markevanstech.com/2008/10/17/freemium-is-not-a-business-model

I haven't specifically pinpointed my hypothesis or, generally, what I want to answer in the thesis, so I hope any of you have some interesting ideas as to a possible direction. I just know that I have a keen interest in business models, and want to better understand the how's and why's of the freemium model.

So, dear HN, do you have any ideas, thoughts, examples or articles?

6 comments

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brianbreslin
Interesting thesis. Is this for a masters in econ? or what?

I'd look at the levers that are required in freemium models for them to succeed: - high conversion rate from free to paid - enough value in the upgrade proposition - market/product fit (many of these freemium products fail there)

this is a fascinating topic for a thesis. keep us posted on how it goes.

kjbekkelund
I'm studying entrepreneurship at a Norwegian university (http://www.ntnu.edu/).

I will probably write up some blog posts along the way and post them to HN!

kjbekkelund
I wrote more about doing my master thesis on freemium at http://kimjoar.net/why-i-want-to-write-a-master-thesis-about...
mixu
Don't let me discourage you, but there is a reason why there is little research on freemium business models: it is theoretically not very different from premium business models (price discrimination), except for the fact that the lowest tier is free instead of paid and that the company benefits from network effects from the free users. So the big issues are in price discrimination research and research on network effects.

Not that it isn't an important new idea in practice, since the psychological difference between 0.01 cents and 0.00 cents is huge.

If you end up doing the thesis with on freemium, you'll probably either end up doing a quantitative analysis (check out the quant research on shareware), or qualitative analysis around price discrimination, network effects and business models (check out this MA thesis https://jyx.jyu.fi/dspace/handle/123456789/23051).