LinkedIn Joins ESPN, Skype in Shifting from Free to 'Freemium'

(page 2 of 2)

Pandora Media Inc., a music service that lets people listen to songs online for free, added a $36-a-year product in May that features better audio quality and no ads. The company still generates more than 90 percent of its revenue from ads targeting customers who use the site for free, said Peter Rip, a general partner at Crosslink Capital in San Francisco.

'Huge Difference'

"When you pay a subscription on Pandora, you get a higher-quality digital music feed," said Rip, whose firm is the biggest investor in Pandora. "You can hear a huge difference when it goes through your home stereo system."

Variety, the Hollywood trade publication owned by London-based Reed Elsevier Plc, started requiring some visitors this month to sign up for a subscription after they browse two pages. The freemium news model has worked for News Corp.'s (NWS) Wall Street Journal, which has more than 2 million paid customers, according to its site. The subscription costs about $100 a year.

The newspaper's success hasn't been replicated by competitors. That's because so much news is available for free and charging for it reduces readership, making the pages less attractive to advertisers, said Steve Hasker, president of Nielsen Co.'s media and advertising products group in New York.

Of the top 25 newspaper sites visited by Internet users in the U.S., only The Wall Street Journal charges for access to stories, according to ComScore Inc., a research firm in Reston, Virginia. New York Times Co. (NYT) abandoned its last paid-content effort in 2007.

Expect Free

"We've trained people to expect news content, and increasingly video and audio, for free," Hasker said. Advertisers want "eyeballs and large audiences."

Like LinkedIn, Monster Worldwide Inc. (MWW) seeks to attract users with free content—job listings and career advice—while charging recruiters. Monster, the world's largest online-recruiting company, introduced a Power Resume Search feature in October that costs 30 percent more than the previous product, Chief Executive Officer Salvatore Iannuzzi said on a conference call that month.

New York-based Monster, seeking to reverse five straight quarters of declining sales, raised the price because the new product uses "semantic search" technology that understands job-seekers' qualifications better than old algorithms that hunted for keywords. The old and new products aren't comparable, Iannuzzi said.

Online Games

The growing popularity of video games on social-networking site Facebook Inc. has led to surging revenue at Zynga Game Network Inc., maker of "Mafia Wars" and "FarmVille." Zynga, started in San Francisco in 2007, lets users play for free. The company makes money from micro-transactions, which allow players to buy virtual goods like a sawed-off shotgun or wheelbarrow to use in the games.

Zynga received a $180 million investment this week from investors led by Digital Sky Technologies, partly owned by Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov. More than 1 million of Zynga's 230 million monthly active users buy virtual goods, the company said. Sales may jump 69 percent to $355 million next year, according to Justin Smith, founder of the industry-tracking Web site Inside Social Games.

"People will pay for content totally depending on their necessity for content and the ability to get it free online," said Ellen Siminoff, a former Yahoo! Inc. (YHOO) executive and co-founder of education Web site Shmoop University Inc. in Mountain View. "The key thing is the uniqueness of the content."

To contact the reporters on this story: Ari Levy in San Francisco at alevy5@bloomberg.net; Greg Bensinger in New York at gbensinger1@bloomberg.net.

Business Exchange

Track and share business topics across the Web.