Path to introduce premium service
Personal journaling social network app Path is to introduce a premium service later this year. That's according to Dave Morin, speaking to TechCrunch. Morin has been tackling what every entrepreneur needs to figure out at some point: "How do we monetize this thing?" He believes making Path into a "freemium" service is the way to go.
"We started out by selling some photo filters but that's been a small business. Later in the year we're going be rolling out virtual goods and a premium service in the first half of this year," he told TechCrunch. "A business model is important, but we want to be in a trust relationship with users. Evernote, Spotify and Dropbox have had great success with fermium models... Yammer and Basecamp have always been subscription models – so it's not that different... The friction for converting users to a freemium service is much lower than it has been in the past... We're seeing big numbers in freemium so we guess it's worth a shot. And mobile is driving this."
Morin didn't say what a paid-for premium Path service might look like, but he did announce that Path's new search engine has paid off. Since its unveiling, Path traffic is up 40 percent.
Path is a free download.
