Maybe you want to try Skype-out, but don’t want to be saddled with paying for unused minutes if the “VOIP revolution in telephony” isn’t your thing. Well, Mountain View-based TrialPay will let you get a 3 month trial of free minutes by buying something on eBay or participating in any of 129 other partner offers.
The Skype deal is just one example of TrialPlay’s ongoing promotions to help services make some money, while hooking new users and advertisers gain customers from trying something new, while paying for something familiar. The company is working with over 1,500 businesses to let users “pay” for their products by participating in an advertisers program, which range from buying a subscription to the Economist, to trying out anti-wrinkle cream.
While TrialPay CEO Alex Rampell can’t say how much Skype is making off their offers, he did say that “for most of our merchants, we are yielding between 10-100% in incremental revenue. A company like Skype might make $80 on a consumer not willing to buy their $8.85 calling plan”. He went on to say “Skype now yields significant revenue for Staples.com, because people shop at Staples.com in order to get Skype credits for free”. Conceivably, users not willing to buy Skype may be willing to buy enough from Staples to actually generate more revenue than Skype’s purchase price. He made no qualifications about how commonly the over-achieving offers occur, though.
But businesses do have some control over how potentially lucrative the deals are. They can set a minimum acceptable price “MAP” for the revenue generated by offers customers can use to “buy” your product. While it make sense to set the minimum at the price of your good, digital goods can maximize their profits by selling more at a lower price. Regardless of the price, TrialPay always orders the offers in a profit maximizing order based on expected total revenue, with the most lucrative deals at top.
Kind of like freeiphone.com — without the iphone.
I’m sure to some degree these things do work, but like clipping coupons, it’s hard to justify the savings that you literally trade your life to get. I suppose it can be spead up with an automatic toolbar that would insert affiliate codes anytime you were at a partner site, but a lot of people might find that intrusive.
Kind of like freeipods.com — without the ipod. (delete first post)
These guys rock – I received a free year of Webroot Software and a Citibank credit card. Given that credit card companies will pay up to a couple hundred bucks for customer acquisition (I think that is correct??) – Webroot gets their $36, Citibank gets a new credit card account, and TrialPay gets $35-$150 potentially. Great Model and the UI was perfect.
Used Trialpay to get Trillian Pro, I was expecting to try 10 different offers…luckily I only had to get free stamps from stamps.com. It would be nice to use them on Amazon or Itunes … free books and music sounds good!
You mean make money “FOR” free. Guys you need to QA check each others work. It’s just plain sloppy. Or, hire an editor who can quickly check.
Dictionaries are your friend.
Jeremiah…that’s the whole point of the article…these guys seems to be making money out of “free” products!
WILL NOT WORK!
Don’t be a sucker people! Whenever anyone says: free, enlargement, offer, Leopard, easy, hair growth, …. It’s a scam!
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
Ok, the title is fixed, thanks!
Carry on.
Actually this is a pretty cool way to get minutes.
Kinda weird but I used trialpay when I purchased my Trillian software and received both Trillian and a shipment of coffee from one of their providers.
Def not a scam though…..it’s worth trying if you’re interested.
Amazing and so innovative.
http://www.meetingflex.com
We’ve been using TrialPay as one of the options for people to “Buy” our software for about a year now. It works great! About 10% of the $ we get comes through them. It’s just one of the regular options on our ordering pages.
It’s not really free, it’s really a “Sign up for the NetFlix service and get {our software} for free” deal. With many things to choose from: sign up for eBay, get a quote on insurance from Geico, order stamps from stamps.com, etc. there’s a lot of options.
All those companies pay for leads/signups.
This has been done before by both Gratis Internet (FreeiPods.com) and OfferCentric which runs a bunch of free product and free iTunes sites. Neither did well.
TrialPay is probably doing well for now due to all the free media attention. Once that’s gone, it’s all down hill. Just look at FreeiPods.com. They went from doing over $30 million a year and a high spot on the Forbes fastest growing companies list to probably 1/10th of that now. Why? The media attention died.
I don’t see how this does much for merchants. TrialPay says on their site:
“Most likely, over 95% of the customers visiting your site are not willing to pay for your product or service. These potential customers, however, are a great fit for someone else’s business.”
1. If 95% of visitors are not willing to buy my product/service then they most likely don’t want it enough to buy something from another site just to get a short trial of my product/service for free.
2. As a merchant, it would be much simpler for me and my customers to just offer a free 1 week or 1 month trial. Customers wouldn’t have to sign up on TrialPay, purchase something from someone else and wait for TrialPay to get confirmation to get their free trial. If the service I’m offering is any good then I shouldn’t be afraid to offer a short, free trial. Getting a few bucks for a trial won’t do me much good if no one likes my service to stay on past the trial.
3. Many merchants are shying away from incentive sites like this making the pool of available offers smaller each month. The problem isn’t that incentive sites are bad or scams, the majority are neither but that some people out there abuse these programs with stolen credit cards or purchase the same product/service over and over then cancels their orders as soon as they get credit on the incentive site. Because the ad networks and even the merchants do little to nothing to curb fraud, merchants and even some ad networks no long allow sites like these to run their offers.
4. The services TrialPay offers just aren’t worth it to most people considering the hassle. Think about it… if you’re broke and have some time on your hands (the exact demo freebie sites target), which would appeal to you more:
a) Spend $10-$50 for a product/service to get a $9-$30 trial of a service.
b) Spend about $80 and a few hours getting 4-5 of your friends/family to purchase the same products/services to get a $300 iPod or $300 in cash from one of the other freebie sites.
The site looks nice though. If they’re lucky, someone will buy them out before tank.
The concept seems new, I am not sure about how much it would be successful for conversion but it will at least help to retain the viewers.
Trialpay looks and sounds a hell of a lot like the service Trialclix which screwed me over a few years ago and is now non-existent. I wonder if trialpay is breaking their affiliate program’s TOS which outline that motivate users by giving gifts Like ‘Meh’ mentioned above, these things thrive on huge media coverage and will only succeed as new users come aboard, be careful, it won’t last.
I believe those guys running Trialpay are genius marketers even though their innovative marketing strategy is not yet well understood by me. I am going to look deeper into it to fully understand their concept. This is visionary and brilliant, reminds me of Steve Jobs
Beware TrialPay! These guys are annoying spammers. They got a hold of my email from LinkedIn and wont stop sending me sales solicitation crap. They have their shit together so well that I have 3 different sales people bugging the hell out of me with these lame canned salesforce email blasts:
“Hello, I am with TrialPay – a venture backed company based in Mountain View, California that has a unique value proposition for online merchants and consumers. I am reaching out to you to explore a potential relationship between TrialPay (www.trialpay.com) and and to see if we can set up a time to speak over the next week or so.. blah blah blah.”
Yeah TrialPay. You got mentioned in TechCrunch. Go high five your VC’s and quit spamming me about your lame service.
Seems similar to sites like InboxDollars and CashCrate – or in the old days that other one, didn’t it start with a Z and went out of business recently?
TrialPay CEO is Alex Rampell… isn’t this the guy who was proud selling spyware?
http://www.usat...-20-email_x.htm
Rampell Software CEO Alex Rampell says he’s braced for controversy. “It can be used inappropriately, but our intentions are good,” he says.
I understand how some may be suspicious about getting a “free lunch” or confuse our service with the free-ipod websites – which essentially scam consumers through a breakage model and deliver poor quality customers to advertisers.
However, TrialPay is completely different.
1. We are transparent with our consumers: you get free Skype minutes/services only when you transact with one of our advertisers.
2. We work with brand name advertisers such as AMEX, GAP, Economist etc. 3. We do not rely breakage – since we only ask consumers to try a single offer, we only get paid if that consumer successfully buys from one of our advertisers.
As a result, we work with over 1,500 branded merchants, including the NY Times, McAfee, Plaxo, Broderbund and Zagat, who trust us to provide a transparent and effective payment alternative for their consumers. Here’s a more detailed article about the service in the Wall Street Journal:
http://webrepri...82770250003.pdf
Hey – I scored a copy of Network Magic for my folks for signing up to some two week no-cost trial of a an audiobook website. I spent no money, and got the 3 computer license version – it’s exactly the same as the commercial version. Just pick your offers carefully.