Right, I understand what they are trying to do, but it still makes little sense to me. Right off the bat you have to double the amount of people who create WSOs just to get back to the level of revenue you were at when you initially bought the site. Do you really think there are that many more people who are going to create WSOs? It's already bad enough with the amount of sheer garbage that is pumped out over there. Just what they need. Also, when you lower the "barrier to entry" you diminish the quality. It is like this in any marketplace.
I always try to look at it this way. If someone is selling you an SEO service, but has a hard time paying $40 to launch a BST thread, what does that tell you about the quality of his service? If someone is selling a WSO about how to make money or this and that and has an a problem paying the entry fee of $40, do you really want to buy a WSO from a person like this? If anything they should increase the cost to launch a WSO. This weeds out a ton of garbage.
Another way to look at it is this way - if they want to generate $10K a month in revenue they need to sell 500 WSO (plus renews). If they raised the price to $100 (this is minimal comparably speaking), you would only have to sell 100 WSOs including renews. So this way, you can lose 4 out of 5 prospective customers and still make the same amount of revenue. I would suspect they would maybe lose 1 out of 5 if they raised it to this price.
I don't know. It's their business, but I think it's a bad move by Freelancer.com.