Reduce Price to Improve Revenues and Margins

CHOICE 1 OBJECTIVE: REWARD CUSTOMERS

CHOICE 2 ISOLATE SEGMENTS: LOSS LEADER SEGMENT

CHOICE 3 COMPONENT: PROVIDE A FREE, OR HEAVILY DISCOUNTED, PRODUCT FROM THE COMPANY, OTHER THAN THE PRODUCT ON SALE

No.	SIC	Year	Notes
1	2711	1994	Giveaway magazines are taking advertising and classifieds away from traditional newspapers. These "free" guides for rentals, homes, cars, etc. attract fewer readers than a newspaper, but readers focused, looking for specific product to buy.
2	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.
3	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.
4	3571	1999	PeoplePC Inc. is the latest in an emerging group. These firms give consumers PCs in exchange for signing them to long-term Internet service contracts. Unlike some rivals, PeoplePC won't sell many ads on its Web site. Instead, it plans to get revenue from Internet service and from fees for the sale of goods made via its Web site.
5	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.
6	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.
7	5961	1999	Free-PC gives away personal computers that permanently display on-screen ads.
8	6141	2004	The financial services offered by Bankrate.com are free to visitors because advertisers pay to keep the site up and running.
9	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.
10	7372	1995	Yahoo! offers free service to all comers and a vast list of Web sites. (It makes money off ads.)
1	7372	2000	Microsoft and Net2Phone have signed a deal to allow Microsoft's instant messaging users to make free long-distance phone calls over the web. Net2Phone will make money off the deal by selling advertisements that will appear on screen everytime Microsoft users connect to the new service to make a phone call.
12	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.
13	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.
14	7375	1996	PointCast, like broadcast TV, is free, since advertisements are included.
15	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.
16	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.
17	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.
18	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.
19	7375	2007	Internet users are often reluctant to pay for what TrialPay calls "non-tangible digital goods." having become accustomed to free Internet services. Zagat employed TrialPay to break down these barriers. The company allows Zagat to lure new users by offering a free Zagat subscription should they accept another unrelated marketing pitch, like applying for a credit card or spending a certain amount at an online retailer. The pitch is sent to people who are registered to use the site but aren't paying subscribers. About 10% of those who receive the email are participating, a high conversion rate compared with previous marketing campaigns. Zagat collects fees from partners for directing business this way, in some cases these fees exceed the yearly subscription cost.
20	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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