Over the past years, the internet has become a significant economic factor, with a turnover of more than 25 billion EUR in Germany in 2010. While a variety of successful business models has been established in the e-commerce sector, i.e. in "classic" online sales, suppliers of e-services that are free for the end customer are facing big challenges.
People see a lot of growth potential in free e-services like facebook. However, the fact that - despite large user bases and intense interaction with the end user - many service providers currently generate low profits indicates that they are still lacking successful business models as well as concepts to measure, design and increase productivity.
The Fre(E)S project therefore aims at developing a theoretically and empirically substantiated concept to measure, design and increase the productivity of free online services.
