1. School of Computing, April 2015
Business Information Systems Honours Project undertaken by Urszula Doloto and supervised by Dr. Colin Smith
Investigation on
model as a method of capturing the value in the age of social computing
Backgrounds
Freemium model is widely used within digital content industry giving free access
to basic features of a digital product and charging fees only for premium services.
The model assumes that few paying users will generate enough revenue to cover
free usage and enough to bring profit to a company.
Problem
The content industry tends to add social features such as forums, posting
comments or ratings as enhancing element to their traditional content, instead of
taking advantage of value created by users in the social computing. This can be
changed by empirical research of this nature confirming that there is a strong
relationship between content consumption and social experinces.
Aim
To create a guideline providing a broader understanding of social computing as
critical success factor for content providers using Freemium model.
Approach
This project investigated social experiences coming from consumption of content
enabled by relationships created around it and referred to as ’positive emotional
attachment’. Empirical data were collected through online survey from Blipfoto
members using the site for creating personal daily photo journals.
Findings
Figure 1: Distribution of followers between free and premium users
Content Consumption
FREEMIUM
MODEL
Commitment Attention from others
Figure 2: ‘Willingness to pay’ factors