Thursday, May 8, 2008

Internet Business Models Part 2

I started this blog with Internet business models and then got drifted to advertisements, perhaps because it is so vast and difficult to understand :) I will come back to it probably sometime down the line. Let's review some more business models to widen our understanding of net commerce. As per my research following represent some other interesting models:
1. Affiliate Model: An affiliate model allow you to acquire customers with the help of your partners/affiliates. The partner or affiliate would typically put a link on his web site pointing to yours. You share the revenue with the partner if you are able to make a sale to the referred customer. This is a very common model and a vast number of web sites in this ecosystem use it. There are broker companies like commissionjunction or element5 which act as a broker between publishers and advertisers. The commissions vary from 5% to 60% or more depending upon the publisher.
2. E-Commerce: This model allows you to sell a product or service through web site. You can create a e-commerce environment and then charge sellers for hosting their products. The sellers can be charged catalog listing fee as well as a share from each sale that is being made. There are different types of e-commerce models - business-to-business(b2b), business-to-customer(b2c), customer-to-customer(c2c).
3. Catalog Listing: This is another interesting model where the site owner provides the platform for uploading different catalogs. For example a real estate owner can list a number of properties that he wants to sell or rent. Similarly, a rental car agency can list all the cars available on rent for users to search and select. The publisher is charged for the duration of time for which the content will remain hosted on the web site.

I will come back to some other interesting models later this week. For now you can check out a good collection of these models at Fred Wilson's blog

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