Many surmise payments for cloud services will cover the difference. Freemium services will certainly expand, but advertising-based business models in the cloud arena will certainly expand all the more rapidly. Remember the days before Google when companies like Yahoo dominated online search through what was mostly a directory-based system? Those days are now over. The same freemium model will eventually be hitting a cloud services company near you.

The struggle is when will online based backup hit the masses? For any freemium business model to fully work, the content must be fixated on growing to meet the needs of a scaled audience. For until you reach scale you will never have the mass necessary to derive much revenue from a free online storage system. This is primarily what huge portals like Amazon, Microsoft and Google are working on doing everyday. Perhaps there will be another innovating leader that will emerge out of the fray of entrenched market companies out there. Perhaps not.