The internet provides a lot of information and entertainment for free.  People pay for access to the internet through internet service providers, or find alternate means through a cafe, library, or school.  How someone connects to the internet reveals how much they value the connection and convenience. YouTube provides free videos to watch.  Gmail provides free email to communicate with others.  Facebook provides games and photos to play with your friends.  There are alternate pay-to-use services that offer comparable services.

So when a service expects a user to pay for part or all the service, the barrier to retaining the user may be grand.  The average user is spoiled.  If it isn’t free, they will find it somewhere else where it is offered for free.  Look at movies.  You can pay full price for a dvd, watch it once, and put it on the bookshelf.  Or you can rent a dvd for a few bucks, watch it once, and not have to worry about storing it on your bookshelf.  Or lastly, you can download it (perhaps illegally) and not pay anything, watch it once, and have it available anytime you want to watch it again.  It may depend of the perceived value compared to the actual cost to choose one over another.

Providing content isn’t cheap or easy.  You have to pay people to create and maintain the content so that users can continue to enjoy content over time.  If you don’t produce content often enough, the user won’t wait around and you end up losing viewers.  Many companies never find the right balance of giving users what they want for free and making at least enough to keep the company above water financially.

Allowing users to try a service before they buy is one way to strike a balance.  Show them what they get if they pay a few bucks.  Let them actually use it and input their data into the system.  Enticing a user to come in the door makes it much more likely they will pay to stay in.  And give a user a little (or a lot) more than what they could get for free with another service.  Many users weigh the benefit they get in return for the cash they hand over.  If the deal isn’t all that great, they won’t bite.