Watch three minutes of on-screen advertising every hour and get a PC for free. This is the crazy marketing idea by Metronomy a UK startup. DMNews.com talked about it this week.
The idea sounds really crazy to me since I can't see balance in the cost for users and for the company. The viral effect of word of mouth about the initiative is the only positive effect I can imagine, and I'm not sure that's enough to justify such an action.

This wont work... there have been too many attempts to monetizing free users. Free users are greedy users, and cheap users, and they rarely click on ads and certainly don't buy services. It will go the way of the juno's and netzero's of the world--it will have to move to a pay model.

Posted by: jonathan at March 30, 2004 10:38 PM