Combating Freeconomics Threat

Every online service has two assets worth monetising - Traffic & Transaction. Advertisements help you monetise the Traffic, but monetising transactions is a bit challenging. There are too many questions that need to be answered before creating a Pricing Strategy for your online services. First of all is Can you offer them Free?. Offering Free is only possible when your Traffic is so great that monetising transactions would have negative or negligible impact on traffic & Revenue. Although most of Web marketing is Monetising the concept of Free Offerings, Traffic in every segment won't ever grow to the extent of making Free Offerings viable, yet few corporate giants can throw free services every now and then as a malicious market capture move. So, the challenges of Monetising the Transaction would remain in most of the foreseeable Future. According to Marketing Guru Philip Kotler, who still seems relevant - Marketing is persistently figuring out to your prospects, How you are giving More for Less. Web based services who want to charge money for transactions may face challenges from people who are giving it for free, regardless of the segment you are in and quality you offer. Free Products have proliferated the Internet so much that even thinking of monetising the transactions seems too risky. Your prospects does not stop with you till he has scanned most or all of your competitors offerings unless you are offering or at least convincingly displaying that you are the cheapest or Free. You are charging for services means risk of loosing the transaction and loosing the traffic in the end. Many services, which people thought would be monetised after sometime at the inception, could never be monetised in fact, email is just one of them. You sell railway tickets or you sell delicious food delivery on demand and even a dating site promising great experience, you frequently encounter this problem. You wonder whether it is possible to combat the threat of Freeconomics of the web, without loosing substantial part of your traffic. Answer lies in another question - Can you constantly & effectively figure out how they can avoid the cost of FREE! by paying an amount which is lesser than what FREE costs you. Would you be able to monetise the transactions on your site depends on How far you are capable of Calculating & Convincingly Demonstrating the cost of Free and How they can avoid it by paying less! People who Pay for services on Internet are those who have either experienced or are being convinced that Free Comes at a Cost.