Fred Wilson has coined the Freemium Business Model.

Give your service away for free, possibly ad supported but maybe not, acquire a lot of customers very efficiently through word of mouth, referral networks, organic search marketing, etc, then offer premium priced value added services or an enhanced version of your service to your customer base.

I'd like to modify tweak that to something I'd call Freemium 2.0:

Give your service away for free in exchange for the attention of users. Understand your users and their intentions as much as possible. Sell the attention and the intention of your users to businesses looking to reach those users. Profit by helping those businesses grow. Ultimately, the goal is to become an intermediary that is a platform between businesses and the users whose attention you have and whose intentions you understand.

And there you have it: Freemium 2.0. Or, the business model known as Google.

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