No Such Thing As A Free App

A Taxonomy of Freemium Business Models and User Archetypes

DOI

10.2991/aebmr.k.201222.001How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Freemium business model, Microtransaction, Monetization strategy, Mobile games, Classification schemes, Logical partitioning

Abstract

The Freemium business model is becoming increasingly prominent in the current digital economy. In the mobile game market, total revenue from free to download apps is overtaking those from paid apps. The purpose of this article is to propose a taxonomy that examines and categorizes the various types of Freemium business models. This study uses the systematic, logical partitioning approach to generate a taxonomy of the Freemium business model, identifying advertisement and microtransaction as two primary sources of revenue. The taxonomy also reveals different types of in-app purchases, the most dominant form of Freemium business model in the mobile game market. Further discussion connects the taxonomy to related issues such as user archetypes and user flows. This paper also extends the existing archetypes of Freemium users by adding new categories, namely Remoras and Barnacles, to differentiate free users. Finally, it conceptualizes a novel framework of user flows between the free and the paying state, arguing for a nonlinear flow. These findings should be of interest to academics and policymakers as it provides the foundation for further investigation on the sustainability of the free to download apps.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Imam Salehudin
AU  - Frank Alpert
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/12/23
TI  - No Such Thing As A Free App
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Business and Management Research (ICBMR 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1
EP  - 8
SN  - 2352-5428
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/aebmr.k.201222.001
DO  - 10.2991/aebmr.k.201222.001
ID  - Salehudin2020
ER  -