It was an outpouring of support from users that flipped the script. Xmarks has a small army of faithful fans, many of whom said they’d be willing to pay for the service after hearing Tuesday’s shutdown announcement. Based on the amount of interest, the company it decided it may be able to make a subscription model work as a sustainable business.

For now, Xmarks is asking users who would be willing to $10 a year for Xmarks to register their support on a new Pledgebank page. If you’d be willing to give Xmarks a few dollars to keep the service alive, you pledge your $10 over at Pledgebank (no credit card required).

There’s no guarantee that a premium version of Xmarks will happen. In fact, Xmarks CEO James Joaquin makes it clear on the company blog that a premium service would have to pull in some 100,000 pledges before Xmarks will commit. That means almost 20 percent of Xmarks users would have to pledge their support for the premium version.

As Joaquin points out in his blog post, the conversation rate from free to premium users is typically more like 1 to 3 percent. That’s a long way from Xmarks stated goals, but stranger things have certainly happened in the world of web startups.

Xmarks started as a Firefox extension for syncing bookmarks between your various Firefox installations, but soon expanded to work with Google Chrome, IE and Safari, keeping your bookmarks in perfect sync across all those browsers.

Unfortunately, despite an incredibly useful set of features and a 2-million-strong user base, Xmarks never found a way to make money. After failing to find a buyer and facing increasing costs with little or no way to recoup them, Xmarks announced that it would shut its doors in January, 2011. Over the following two days, Xmarks was inundated with users begging for a reprieve in the form of a paid version.

Now it seems the company is testing the waters to see how many of its enthusiastic users will actually put their money where their mouths are.

This article originally appeared on Webmonkey.com, Wired’s site for all things web development, browsers, and web apps. Follow Webmonkey on Twitter.

More from Webmonkey:

• Popular Bookmark Syncing Tool XMarks to Shut Down
• Xmarks Syncs Open Tabs Across Browsers, iPhone
• Mozilla Gets Ready to Weave Syncing Into Firefox
• Opera Link Connects Your Bookmarks Across Browsers

Authors: Scott Gilbertson

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