Many conversations about interactive products and services come to the point of asking the question “but what if everyone uses that”, ususally reffering to the “free” aspect of a service, or the general priceing, or features etc.
Google - We could give away 1 gig of web space, eeek, but what if everyone uses that? We’ll go out of business
Flickr - We could give away a free account and let anyone upload 100 megs of photos a month, ahhh, but what if everyone uses that? We’ll go out of business
The better question is “what if no one uses it”, which is why snapfish, kodak, shutterfly etc. are all dying in the wake of flickr, because they focused on printing.
Mobhappy points to an interesting flickr fact, out of the 10 Million flickr users 80 people have ordered prints. So the better question is “but what if no one uses that”
What about another important question: “If everyone uses it, how will that make me money?”. This is a question too few web 2.0 businesses are asking before they put together a great new service that attracts thousands of users.
Too true, that’s why i liked flickr as an example, i mean they charged from the begining, and their value proposition was such a slam dunk I signed up the next day. None of the trying to squeek by on a free account. It was $50 bucks a year at first (if memory serves), but for that you got 2 gig’s of upload bandwidth every month, i’m not a math genius but I quickly figured out that was 24 gigs a year, no brainer. Of course I barely use 2% of that on a monthly basis
From a business model standpoint, and this is an often overlooked fact, they bucked the trend of charging for storage, I mean even two years ago if you were basing your business model and pricing on the cost of storage it was like tying your priceing to a falling rock. Flickr was very innnovative by tying their pricing to bandwidth, guess what, it’s still 2gig’s upload a month and they’ve halved the price. Anway, an inovative product combined with an innovative business model was flickr’s success. Everyone else was charging for 100megs of storage and trying to make money of prints.
Thanks for the comment.