December 2008
7 posts
Long Tail tidbits from Nielson's 2008 music stats
Just got the release. Two interesting bits I noticed: “There are more than 450,000 different physical albums that sold at least one copy over the Internet during 2008 compared to 390,000 in 2007.” and “The top 100 ringtones sold 43.8 million, accounting for 26% of all ringtone sales for the year; down from 30% in 2007”
Zappos' long tail: 3.4 million products
I used Zappos, the online shoe retailer, as an example of the Long Tail of footwear in the book. I think at the time they had something like 200,000 kinds of shoes, which was extraordinary, compared to the selection in any traditional shoestore. Today, I happened to be back and noticed that they’ve grown a bit since then: “1,196 Brands - 167,688 Styles - 3,293,215 Total Products...
The sustainable open source business model: charge...
Open source zealots don’t like it, but the most sucessful open source developers are adopting a model where consumers get the software for free but companies of any size have to pay. The companies don’t mind, because they get services with that.
Why Freemium rises in a down economy
A pair of articles on the rise of Freeimum business models to replace the ad-driven models of most of the older Web 2.0 software companies. An option as ad spending falls.
Are the number of free iPhone apps inhibiting more...
Slashdot discusses the impact of the race to zero in the iTunes/iPhone app store
Kevin Kelly's "Better Than Free" essay, improved
Kevin writes: “How do you make money with the free? My answer is you offer something better than free. I gave eight examples of what I call Generatives that improve upon the free. That post, entitled Better Than Free, got a lot of attention, garnered many comments, got Digged and Reddited, and was translated into several languages by fans. Now it is available as a free (of course!)...
Is the Open Source business model broken?
Stuart Cohen, a software company CEO, argues that the freemium business model of open source software—give away the code, charge for the support—is broken because open source software is so good it doesn’t need much support. Putting aside whether that’s true or not, he defines “broken” as “not meeting investor expectations.” An alternative view is...
