There is a good podcast by planetmoney explaining it. Mostly it is because there are so many industries and interests touched that regardless of what you negotiate, there will be public outrage and pressure on the negotiators which make it much harder to reach an agreement. If that is the case though, I am not sure whether an agreement must be reached...
It's rather maddening to think that by actually providing a warning about some shady company they are still helped by such review sites. Consequently I don't write bad reviews, but only recommend either directly or write about very positive interactions.
I'd find the number intersting how many users would pay, if there were no free option available - my take is that it would be much more than the one percent of users that seem to be the rule in the freemium model. Of course a free plan attracts more potential users in the first place, which means the cake is smaller, so it's hard to evaluate what yields more paying users...
The more important factor to me, though, is cost and that usually not only involves storing some data as in the case of historious, but also support requests and scaling costs - when you have a paying user base scaling just won't be that much of pain point.
So, I'll go with a free 30 Day trial period after which the user has to decide, whether he'd like to sign up and pay. That way I can easily handle a couple of thousand users on one server and have more time left to spend on development instead of suporting nonpaying customers.
Free or Freemium only makes sense to me, if the presence of more users provides value to paying users, e.g. okcupid, Skype, and other network-effect businesses.
Our free package is a trial. The 300 free bookmarks either run out quickly, so the user has to select whether to pay or leave, or they last long enough that the user needs no more, at which point we don't mind the cost.
It works out much better than a time-based trial, which I don't think makes very much sense when you can have other factors.
Rational Choice Theory says you are right, but it can't explain why people vote nonetheless, even though the perceived cost is so high for the small actual gain.
Some people seem to get value out of voting itself, regardless of the outcome, which is bad news for a rational choice theory only looking at the value of the outcomes and not the inherent value of the choice itself.
Well, as the chance that the vote one casts is actually making a difference is so miniscule and the cost of informing yourself about the poltical agenda of parties rather high it is rational and utility maximising not to vote and to stay ignorant.
Another option is to set up an affiliate program and pay for leads / sales. That way people will start on the one hand to create landingpages or put your ads on some pages, but they will also try to earn money by bidding on keywords and sending traffic to your site.
If you are sneaky you can track the sources and adwords with a tracking software like google analytics to find out which keywords are working well and then start to bid yourself on those. (But that would drive away those affiliates doing the research for good keywords... but depending on the attractiveness of your affiliateprogram there might be others...)
That's too bad, I always recommended the service for easy collaboration and sharing, was one of my favourites.
But well, Facebook will hopefully make good use of the technology and the many channels drop.io had already incorporated to extend it's group collaboration options.
Starting a startup gives you immediately a lot of freedom, a focus on what you like and exciting new challenges and it will also get alot of new people in your life - even if introverted. Afresh start and clean cut is somethign I found incredibly invigorating. And aas young as you are, the risks are pretty negligible.
Great offer. Perhaps a small idea for those looking to put an original element in their CV that I used successfully:
Put your Skills in as a Tagcloud. Strong skills get a bigger fontsize than minor skills. Additionally I used grey tones to indicate which skills have been used more recently and which are older (more grey than black, paling so to speak.)
It is somewhat daring, because not necessarily everyone gets tagclouds yet - but I was invited quite a few times for the tag cloud to interviews.
Anyhow, interesting podcast: http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/06/26/417851577/episo...