Monetization as a Motivator for the Freemium Educational Platform Growth
This addresses growth strategies for freemium educational platforms, showing monetization can complement viral mechanisms, but it is incremental as it builds on existing freemium models.
The study examined how introducing monetization on a freemium educational platform affected user behavior, finding that it led to alternative growth mechanisms and nearly doubled the weekly K-factor, indicating a viral increase in users.
The paper describes user behavior as a result of introducing monetization in the freemium educational online platform. Monetization resulted in alternative system growth mechanisms, causing viral increase in the number of users. Given different options, users choose the most advantageous and simple ones for them. System metrics in terms of the K-factor was utilized as an indicator of the system user base growth. The weekly K-factor almost doubled as a result of monetization introduction. Monetization and viral growth can be both competing and complementary mechanisms for the system growth.