Sunday, October 3, 2010

Xmarks launches pledge campaign to stay alive

Xmarks launches pledge campaign to stay alive

Filed under: Utilities, Productivity, Web services, Browsers

Xmarks' announcement that it would be shutting down in the near future is turning into a topsy-turvy saga. Now the Xmarks team has decided to reconsider offering a premium service in order to keep the product alive, thanks to an outcry from Xmarks fans. Here's the pitch: if you love Xmarks, pledge $10-20 to say you'd commit to a premium service. Your pledge doesn't require a credit card number, it's just a way of saying "I'd pay for this if you launched it."

If 100,000 people express interest, Xmarks may get a fresh start with a new company. The freemium model wasn't something Xmarks had ever considered before, because it now has to compete with free solutions like the ones built into Firefox and Chrome. None of those browser-based alternatives offer cross-browser syncing, though, so Xmarks can stay in the game if enough people are willing to pay for it.

Also worth noting: only 0.001% of the people who downloaded the Xmarks Firefox add-on actually clicked the donate button on the add-on page, and most of those were from Europe. That doesn't bode well for the pledge campaign, but we're rooting for Xmarks!

As I write this, they're up to nearly 1500 of the 100,000-pledge goal.

Xmarks launches pledge campaign to stay alive originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 30 Sep 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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