
The Economics of Building Knowledge Bases - miket
http://blog.diffbot.com/the-economics-of-building-knowledge-bases/
======
mjpuser
This is a compelling article, but then when you try to see what the product
is, you have to submit your email / request a demo. In my experience, hiding
your product behind a demo is a bad sign that the product has flaws. It also
puts you in contact with a salesman or account manager which is typically
geared towards a high pressure sale event of the product. I'd be interested to
hear other people's experiences with this model, though.

~~~
m_ke
Sometimes with products like this one the value that it provides to the
customer varies significantly depending on a use case and it's hard to put up
pricing without either cutting out a long tail of smaller users or losing
money on the big deals.

I have an API that market research and medical customers are willing to pay
100x more for than consumer social, at the same time the consumer companies
have 100x the volume.

~~~
sokoloff
Find a way to segment that into two markets based on features or volume. Don't
try to do it by making your customers take a phone call before telling them
anything about the product. That's a move that even Oracle sales would think
twice about...

------
zozbot234
Freebase was not just "shut down" out of nowhere. A data dump is still
available, and some of it was merged into Wikidata but overall the resource
was found to be of poor reliability. It may have had very accurate data _on
average_ , but this was not enough for many Wikidata use cases.

