Freemium — Blog — Ryan Spoon

More data out of the Freemium Summit and following the great insights from Evernote. Here are tidbits from Pandora and Dropbox about their freemium business models and results. More case studies and data are available on GigaOM.

Pandora Freemium product: Pandora One Premium features: higher quality streams, desktop app, no usage limits Results: 300,000 subscribers - 1.6-1.7% of monthly uniques Dropbox Premium features: Bandwidth Results: Dropbox has one of the best referral programs on the web (see my review here). The program increased signups by 60% and now drives 30% of all signups. Organization: 30% of the engineering is devoted to user acquisition

Evernote (see full write up here) Premium features: premium account, bandwidth Results: 1.8% of users (6% of active users) have converted to premium users. And Evernote has driven 50K premium subs in 28 months.

Attention freemium marketers: popular utility application Evernote gave a very detailed overview of their freemium business... and the data is both fascinating and within the typical band of freemium products. The major takeaway: 1.8% of users (6% of active users) have converted to premium users. And Evernote has driven 50K premium subs in 28 months. I appreciate Evernote's willingness to provide visibility into their model as it helps other freemium businesses learn and optimize accordingly; and as we know, freemium has become a productive, consumer-friendly way to monetize apps, services, social content, etc.

I encourage you to read the full article on Venturebeat... but high-level statistics are below. If you are a freemium business and are interested in analyzing your performance, KISSmetrics is a great solution (Polaris portfolio company).

- 2.7m users with 7,000 added daily - Premium accounts are $5.00 / month - Has product on iPhone, Android, Mac, PC, and web - 60% of audience is US - 50,000 paying subscribers which is 1.8% of users and 6% of actives - "The key to hanging on to older users is introducing new features." - Cost per active user is $0.09 (originally was $0.50) - Revenue per active user is $0.70 per month