How much is too little?

The freemium model is well thrashed out on social media scenes as an accepted way to draw people in to your premium content. The idea being that  people are left wondering what they get if they pay for something, if this is what you can afford to give away for free.

The tricky thing though, is deciding how much you should give away for free. There’s a middle ground between giving it all away and not giving even a hint of what people can get if they pay.The biggest problem facing content providers and services is that now users can pretty much find anything they want for free online, in some iteration.

Hulu are supposedly due to trial a subscription service to allow users wider access to content. Would you be willing to pay for this though, when – if you dared to tackle youtube’s search function – you’re bound to find it in some version for free?

The key to the freemium model is quality. Yes, you could probably find pretty much any video clip online, but wouldn’t you rather a full-length, ad free version that’s an upload of the original content? This is where the Freemium model really kicks in. The only way to ensure quality is to build up trust on your site. People have to build up trust in your brand and the content you provide, to be assured it’s really worth paying for. Not really a hard task for established brands. If the Guardian slapped up a subscription page tomorrow, I’d pay immediately. If I’d just stumbled upon a new tech blog that did the same, the chances are I’d just go and find a similar article on Google News.

As the interent and in particular, social media, has resulted in a near saturation of content producers, trust and credibility is becoming a harder challenge for those brands that want to monetise their content. It’s pretty clear that there’s little to no money in online advertising models anymore, so subscription or paid content has to be the model that works. Brands are frequently experimenting with different ways of doing this.

When spotify removed their free accounts in Europe last month (outside of 6  approved countries), I was pretty angry and decided to find a newer, better solution. I didn’t, so I’m signing up for a paid account today. I wouldn’t be doing this though if I hadn’t already been using the service for months, building up playlists which I could listen to and installing it on every computer I use (a lot).

Again though, spotify played a dangerous game. By giving, then revoking free accounts for European users, they pissed a lot of people off. It’s only because it’s one of the best solutions out there they could afford to do this. Not a claim many companies could make so you have to make sure you let people see why you’re worth paying for.