Fin July, Elon Musk suffered a setback with the 50% drop in advertiser investment on Twitter [aujourd’hui appelé X]. It is no doubt to anticipate this fall that, upon arrival, [à l’automne 2022], one of the projects opened by the entrepreneur was that of the monetization of the platform. Very quickly, the founder of Tesla had, in fact, decided to create a new service, Twitter Blue. Certification for a subscription of 10 euros per month. A way to step over the future fragmentation of the online advertising market. Unfortunately for him, this strategy is struggling, for the moment, to produce results. According to researcher Travis Brown, just over 60,000 people have agreed to put their hands in their pockets to get or keep their account certified.
Beyond the case of Twitter, this news sheds light on the issues of monetization of tech players. A challenge taken up in such an original way by OpenAI that it constitutes a textbook case. Initially, monetization was one of OpenAI’s blind spots. But, faced with the dazzling success of ChatGPT – the AI took only two months to cross the milestone of 100 million users, compared to two and a half years for Instagram and nine months for TikTok – Sam Altman and his teams reacted promptly. : instead of determining a blind price, they acted in an unprecedented way.
ChatGPT offers an almost unlimited range of uses. Consequently, the perceived value of these uses varies from one user to another. The OpenAI teams therefore decided to speak directly to users to set the price. Is it risky? Not necessarily.
For several decades, experiments of the type pay what you want (“pay what you want”) have been carried out around the world: merchants or tourist sites have let customers set the price of meals themselves. In the majority of cases, the amounts estimated by customers were higher than the actual prices… OpenAI therefore opted for a direct methodology combined with an economic model guaranteeing recurring revenue.
Four curves and a quadrilateral
THE price sensitivity meter is a scientific technique for determining consumer price preferences. Introduced in 1976 by the Dutch economist Peter van Westendorp, it is based on four very simple questions to determine the price of a given product: at what price would this product (or service) seem too expensive for you to buy it? At what price would this product (or service) seem expensive to you, but at which you would still be likely to buy it? At what price would this product (or service) seem too cheap to you to buy it, because you would doubt its quality? At what price would this product (or service) seem like a good deal to you?
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