Why? According to Rovio, the paid version was interfering with the much more profitable free versions of its games. Rovio, the company behind the Angry Birds franchise, just shut down its last remaining paid version of the games. At this point, the examples of such business models are ubiquitous, but it wasn’t all that long ago that you would hear executives from various industries flatout state publicly that “nobody can make money from ‘free’.”Īh, the irony. Whatever you lose in not charging for some content, you can make it up via an increase in reach and/or market share, assuming you do it well. The idea, which can certainly be counterintuitive, is that if you make parts of your product free to the customer, particularly the parts that are reproducable at zero marginal cost, then you can build in value-adds one way or another that you can charge for.

For a long, long time, we at Techdirt have been advocating for business models that make use of free content. You have to love a story that comes full circle after all these many years. Tue, Feb 28th 2023 03:30pm - Timothy Geigner

Angry bird friends down