Chris Ander­son start­ed a list of Busi­ness Mod­els on the Web and Fred Wil­son added his thoughts what Dave McClure also did. So far there are 28 dif­fer­ent models:

- CPM ads (“cost per thou­sand views”; ban­ner ads online and reg­u­lar ads in print, TV and radio)
— CPC ads (“cost per click”; think Google ads)
— CPT ads (“cost per trans­ac­tion”; you pay only if the cus­tomer brought to you from a media sites becomes a pay­ing cus­tomer. Here’s an example.)
— Lead gen­er­a­tion (you pay for qual­i­fied names of poten­tial customers)
— Sub­scrip­tion revenues
— Affil­i­ate rev­enues (think: Ama­zon Associates)
— Rental of sub­scriber lists
— Sale of infor­ma­tion (sell­ing data about users–aggregate/statistical or individual–to third parties)

- Licens­ing of brand (peo­ple pay to use a media brand as implied endorsement)
— Licens­ing of con­tent (syn­di­ca­tion)
— Get­ting the users to cre­ate some­thing of value for free and apply­ing any of the above to mon­e­tize it. (Like — Digg or our own Reddit
— Upgrad­ed service/content (ed: aka “freemi­um”)
— Alter­nate out­put (pdf; print/print-on-demand; cus­tomized Shared Book style; etc.)
— Cus­tom services/feeds
— Live events
— “Souvenirs”/“Merchandise”
— Co-branded spinoff

- Cost Per Install (pop­u­lar with top Face­book apps who can help oth­ers get installs)
— E‑commerce (sell­ing stuff direct­ly on your website)
— Spon­sor­ships (ads of some sort that are sold based on time, not on the num­ber of impressions)
— List­ings (pay­ing a time based amount to list some­thing like a job or real estate on your website)
— Paid Inclu­sion (a form of CPC adver­tis­ing where an adver­tis­er pays to be includ­ed in a search result)
— Stream­ing Audio Adver­tis­ing (like radio adver­tis­ing deliv­ered in the audio stream after a cer­tain amount of audio con­tent has been delivered)
— Stream­ing Video Adver­tis­ing (like stream­ing audio but in video)
— API Fees (charg­ing third par­ties to access your API)

- Feed Sense (Enable plat­form users to earn money by shar­ing in plat­form rev­enue from clicks on the News Feed)
— Feed­Search (Cre­ate a Search bar at the top of the News Feed that enables peo­ple to search for activ­i­ty in their net­work by key­word or sug­gest­ed example)
— Fan­PageApps (Con­nect Devel­op­ers direct­ly with Adver­tis­ers, by allow­ing Adver­tis­ers to set open bids for clicks, users, or other activ­i­ty that occurs via plat­form apps)

To that impres­sive list I’d add the B2B side:
— Mar­ket Research (infor­ma­tion on user behaviour)
— Drive traf­fic to media part­ners (e.g. blog widgets)
— PR Por­tal (Offer PR agen­cies pub­lish their con­tent on your site)

A long list com­pared with the typ­i­cal answer of Web CEOs how their com­pa­nies gen­er­ate rev­enues: “Adver­tis­ing and pre­mi­um fees.” Any more ideas?

advertising business model cpm cpo cpt fee membership