Ryan Sholin introduces me to the word “freemium.”

It means, it seems, giving stuff away for free and then taking on up sells.

His example is his recent decision to upgrade his Flickr account.

Up sells are easy in classifieds, as Ryan notes, but not so easy in content.

But I’d take the lesson of Flickr and Feedburner and WordPress and apply them not to content, but to services. What services can newspaper companies create that have free uses but paid upgrades can be bolted on?

Or, how can the relationship a newspaper.com has with members of its community be leveraged to entice the most loyal users to buy services from the paper? What would those services be? What jobs-to-be-done can we help our readers solve?

Free content isn’t just about generating page views to boost advertising revenue. It’s also about building relationships with the people who are attracted to that content.