"Free is only a tactic, though, not a business model." - GigaOm

By Vasudev Ram

I saw an interesting post by Fred Wilson:

Tenacity And Persistence Pays Off.

Fred's post also had a comment by Philip Sugar, to which I replied, asking for more info, and he replied, with a link in his comment to this post: The Penny Gap. That post had an interesting quote from an article on GigaOm:

[ To be fair to these VCs, they’re not advocating doing everything without pay. They’re suggesting free as a tactic towards getting paid in other ways: through advertising, or by premium services (as in a freemium model), or maybe even through being acquired by a company with a large wallet. Free is only a tactic, though, not a business model.

Conflating the two misleads web application developers into thinking they don’t need to do the hard work of figuring out what’s really of value to users before they build and launch their online service. ]

The GigaOm post is here: Free: a Tactic, not a Business Model



- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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A VC's ads changing

A VC: The Missing Ad Unit

Found that interesting for two reasons:

Programmatic vs. conversational ads, and the single column layout optimized for mobile.

See Fred Wilson's post linked above to get what I mean.

- Vasudev Ram
www.dancingbison.com