Reduce Price to Improve Revenues and Margins
CHOICE 1 OBJECTIVE: REWARD CUSTOMERS
CHOICE 2 SEGMENTS: LOSS LEADER SEGMENT / A LOW PRICED PRODUCT TO GET THIRD PARTY BUSINESS
CHOICE 3 COMPONENT: PRODUCTS THE CUSTOMER USES WITH THE PRODUCT FOR SALE
| No. | SIC | Year | Notes |
| 1 | 2711 | 2002 | The website of The New York Times offers almost all of the features readers see in their paper version, free of charge. The weekday crossword is omitted, however. The online version costs $19.95 a year. At least 40,000 people think it's worth paying for. Websites are interested in a new source of revenue at a time when they have invested billions of dollars online with no gains ahead. Venture capitalists put $4.3 billion into online publications and content sites from 1995 through 2001. For now the market for paid content online is at about $500 million for nonpornography sites; online porn is at $230 million. |
| 2 | 2711 | 2007 | Many online publications are abandoning subscription fees. Slate, owned by the Washington Post, began as a free site owned by Microsoft, charged an annual subscription fee for two years and then returned to free content, citing a boom in online advertising. |
| 3 | 4800 | 2004 | Yahoo plans to respond to Google's unveiling of its first e-mail service, Gmail. Gmail is for free and gives users 1 gigabyte of storage which is far more than anyone else has ever offered. However targeted ads come with the service. Yahoo is set to announce it has upped the amount of storage for its free e-mail service to 100 megabytes from 4 megabytes. It has also unveiled a new subscription service that features 2 gigabytes of storage and premium versions of its software to block unsolicited e-mail, or spam, and computer viruses. It will cost $19.99 a year and it comes ad free. |
| 4 | 4899 | 1997 | The idea behind Juno is to attract E-mail users with free permanent addresses and then make money by selling advertising. Anyone with a PC and a modem can download the E-mail software from Juno's Website. |
| 5 | 6141 | 2004 | The financial services offered by Bankrate.com are free to visitors because advertisers pay to keep the site up and running. |
| 6 | 7200 | 2005 | An upstart photo Web site Photobucket.com has surged in popularity ahead of more established names. Photobucket acts as a sort of virtual middleman. It provides a free service that lets users store hundreds of snapshots in photo albums on its site and link to them from anywhere on the Internet, from blogs to eBay auction pages. Photobucket.com Inc., started by a photo buff who wanted a better way to share images with his friends, has seen traffic increase tenfold in the past year. In August, it had 12.2 million unique visitors, compared with 9.6 million at Yahoo Inc.'s Photos and 5.9 million at Eastman Kodak Co's Kodak EasyShare Gallery. |
| 7 | 7372 | 1995 | Yahoo! offers free service to all comers and a vast list of Web sites. (It makes money off ads.) |
| 8 | 7372 | 2005 | In an effort to push back against Google, Yahoo, and other rivals, Microsoft has created a new series of Web services. With Windows Live, Microsoft has created Live.com, where people can create personalized Web pages. In addition to headlines from their favorite sports teams and local weather, they can check out feeds from blogs and audio podcasts. Live.com will also let users post content from their PCs to their Web pages, all in all giving Live.com features that popular services such as My Yahoo lack. With Office Live, Microsoft will provide the software for designing Web sites and the computing capacity to run them for free. As a result, Microsoft will inevitably draw Web surfers and ad dollars away from its MSN Internet portal. |
| 9 | 7372 | 2006 | As simple, serviceable alternatives to Microsoft Office proliferate, it seems as if the era of Web-based software is upon us. The latest example of this trend is Google spreadsheets. It's a free product that includes most of Excel's basic computational skills, including dozens of math, statistical, financial, and other functions. Despite being Web-based, it looks and feels like a desktop application and performs nearly as well. You can open Excel spreadsheets and save your work as an Excel file. And several people can work on the same spreadsheet. The downsides: it only works when you're online, and by default, Google spreadsheets are saved on Google servers. You also can't do charts or graphs. Printing options are limited and work badly for large spreadsheets. And there's no programming language to automate repetitive tasks. |
| 10 | 7375 | 1996 | PointCast, like broadcast TV, is free, since advertisements are included. |
| 11 | 7375 | 2000 | Web portal companies which operate sites designed to be starting point for web surfers are using free Internet services as a way to draw more visitors to their sites. Four of the largest include Yahoo, Excite At Home, Lycos and Alta Vista. |
| 12 | 7375 | 2001 | The three major providers of free Internet service, Netzero Inc., Juno Online Services Inc., and Bluelight.com, are retooling their product offerings and leaning heavily on for-fee services in an effort to boost their bottom lines and win back investors. They have had no trouble signing up Web surfers, all ranking among the top 10 nationwide by number of users but their popularity hasn't translated into profit. Free Internet offerings rely heavily on advertising, and assume that companies will be eager to put their products in front of millions of tech-savvy Web surfers. |
| 13 | 7375 | 2001 | Juno wishes to become the leader of online virtual supercomputing and expects to begin testing the Juno Virtual Supercomputer Project. The venture will require participating Juno customers to keep their computers on it at all times so Juno, of New York, can sell unused time and space on its customers' hard drives to third parties such as scientific researchers who want to solve large computational problems. The practice of using many computers at once to answer such questions at a faster rate is called distributed computing. Juno is one of the largest free ISP's with more than three million subscribers. It has 842,000 paid subscribers. Free subscribers who don't want to participate may be asked to pay for a subscription. |
| 14 | 7375 | 2004 | Google is introducing a new email service called Gmail. The free e-mail service with one gigabyte of storage will have ads down the side of the e-mail message. The ads will be determined by key words in the content of private e-mails. |
| 15 | 7375 | 2006 | In an effort to retain subscribers, AOL is allowing customers who switch to another high-speed internet service provider to retain AOL service, including email, for free. While this will represent a significant decline in profits, it may boost the number of people viewing ads on AOL's website. AOL hopes that advertising will become its main source of revenue. The program should also allow AOL to trim its marketing budget. |
| 16 | 7375 | 2006 | A handful of start-up companies, including Jingle Networks, has begun offering free directory assistance over the phone in return for the customer's willingness to listen to an ad. The free directory is appealing to more customers since traditional phone companies have raised the rates of their services over the past several years. Carriers can charge an average of $1.50 per 411 call on cell phones and $1.15 per call from fixed-line phones. |
| 17 | 7379 | 2000 | A number of companies are offering free storage on the Internet. Some are specialized such as myplay.com which handles only music files in the MP3 format. Others such as Desktop.com and MagicalDesk.com give away disk space as part of a suite of office applications including e-mail, address books, calendars and reminders. In each case, the sign up process demands personal information and prevents the user from opting out of e-mail ads. |
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