Banking & professional services

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The business concept of Nexicon is quite exceptional. Their monitoring service tracks down IP’s of illegal content distributors on bittorent and other peer-to-peer networks. I suppose that this service towards copyright owners like movie studies and record labels can be bought with a some form of subscription. Once identified Nexicon’s system will automatically send out a settlement agreement to the ISP who has to forward it to his own client. In such a letter Nexicon threats with legal action if this distributor doesn’t choose to settle within 10 days by paying 10 dollar per illegally shared item. Nexicon will take a commission on each transaction. Although 10 dollar is far less then normally asked in settlement agreements it can generate an reasonable profit for Nexicon if they are able to track down these p2p-users in large amounts.

‘Experiences’ as we use it in our business model framework are characterized by the emotional impact on a user. Contrary to other ‘experience’ sellers Nexicons tries to offer such a negative experience (fear) that will convince a user to pay a small amount of money. An example of the opposite would be a pay-what-you-want restaurant that tries to offer such a pleasant experience in order to receive a reasonable payment from each client. In the end this shows that you as company should take control over the experience of your customer, even when this is a negative one.

Internet & media

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Get paid to tweet! Yesterday Super Chirp was launched as a tool for twitter users to get paid for their content stream. The application allows twitter users to send direct messages to people who pay to subscribe. Adding new vocabulary, a ‘chirp’ is a direct message sent via twitter to a paying subscriber. Any twitter user can sign up for Super Chirp with his or her existing twitter account (unlike twitpub), and set a monthly price between $0.99 and $9.99. Subscribers pay the small monthly fee for a stream of information. Super Chirp keeps a cut of 30%, leaving 70% for the publisher.

We have touched upon twitter’s monetization before with 77 Ways Twitter Could Make Money. Super Chirp illustrates how 3th party apps are monetizing twitter’s free service by offering paid premiums. Why does twitter refuse to enter the arena? From a user perspective, Super Chirp is another new tool for ‘prosumers’ and organizations to earn money. Think of celebrities (f.e. Britney Spears), stock tips, “the funniest guy on twitter”, horoscopes, charity, authority bloggers, early info… Do you have something unique to sell in small messages?

Banking & professional services

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As previously described on In-Game Selling, companies are moving from advertisement based revenue models to in-app commerce or in-product selling. Timebridge.com is an excellent example of the same principle. Timebridge offers a scheduling service enabling people to collaboratively determine when to meet, also on mobile. Their actual revenue model is the resale of online and phone meeting services. This is not a freemium model, as Timebridge does not sell a premium of its own product. It is not an advertising business model either, since Timebridge is not earning on selling its users’ attention to advertisers. Timebridge’s business model consists of offering its users a free service that serves as broker platform to resell 3th party (meeting) services with commission.

A lot of free products and services go with a freemium or advertising strategy, but advertising is not sustainable for a number of reasons. In-app commerce, or broader, in-product selling is there to challenge advertising. Micro-payments will be a crucial facilitator in getting consumers to actually paying for content again, in times where people are used to free and ad-supported. Like Timebridge, in-game selling, blogs with jobs/widgets/affiliate programs… can your product or service offer a channel to sell and buy things? Sales people earn more than advertisers, don’t they?

Internet & media

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During the most recent edition of Pitch Arena, we presented our business model framework to the entrepreneurs and start-ups that were present. The concept of Pitch Arena is rather straight forward. Several start-ups present their new venture to an audience of innovators and technologists in order to get valuable feedback and meet interesting people. We didn’t pitch our platform but fueled to the Q/A session with our view on the business models of the 4 presenting start-ups. With the theme of this Pitch Arena being ‘Social Applications‘, we clearly distinguished four different models being used. Let’s have a look at two of them today.

Wantz.it : dowant!

Wantz.it offers a simple wish list service to their users. People can easily submit products and services they wish to receive to their list by tagging web pages via twitter, facebook or via their own wantz.it page. Then Wantz.it gives those users different means to actively spread/expose their wish list to their friends. When such a friend decides to buy a gift after clicking on an item in the wish list, a part of the money will be sent towards the wantz.it company as a form of commission.

Tweetag : Twitter clouds!

Tweetag’s social app gives users the possibility to create specific tagclouds. The first part of their service is a form of donationware. When used in a non-commercial context, Tweetag asks for a donation fee. The biggest revenue is planned to follow from a second revenue stream though, as commercial companies will be charged when adding a cloud on their web page. While there might be limited value in knowing what everybody is talking about, it could be very interesting to see what a specific group of people is saying. A newspaper for instance could wish to add a tweet cloud to give their readers insight in what a selection of politicians is tweeting all day. By doing this tweetag creates value.

Consumer goods, Internet & media

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eBay has pioneered the concept of online auctions where people buy and sell goods from and to each other. As discussed in How to build any business model with only 10 blocks,  companies can change a business model by moving from products to services or experiences – keeping all other transactions the same. The evolution of online (peer-to-peer) auctions is an excellent example:

Online product auctions: eBay.com

Online product auctions like on eBay.com bring together buyers and sellers, and take a listing fee or commission on successful transactions. This is a straightforward example of the broker business model, which in principle does not change when moving to transacting services or experiences.

Online service auctions: Zilok.com

On Zilok.com people can rent anything from anyone, from a nice heater to party cooking gear. The transaction is not the ownership of a product, it is the service to use it for a period in time. Myngle.com is another example of online service auctions, bringing together teachers and students on a global language marketplace.

Online experience auctions: Sweemo.com

As a next step, Sweemo.com enables people to buy, sell or swap special experiences or “sweet moments” (after which the UK-based start-up is named). In their own words: “Sweemo is the live auction community where people come to trade real-life experiences”. The auctioned experiences range from a role on a soap opera to an exclusive safari, a backstage pass or a look behind the scenes of a reality show. Experience sellers pay a commission on the final selling price.

Entertainment & tourism

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While In-Game Advertising is growing to $2 billion in 2012, In-Game Selling has all the ingredients to become the next big business model innovation in the gaming industry. Our analysis of the business model behind in-game advertising discussed how game publishers sell the ‘attention’ of their audience to advertisers. The next step now is to go from ‘attention’ to ‘buying’, or from in-game advertising to in-game selling:

• In-Game Advertising: gamers will see in-game references to a Pizza fast food chain, but still need to pick up the phone or surf to the website in order to order pizza delivery.
• In-Game Selling: there is a Pizza delivery icon, shortcut or location in the game environment, where you can order a pizza just by a click of the button. Example: While playing EverQuest II just type /pizza and a web browser will launch the online ordering section of pizzahut.com. Fill in your info and just kick back until fresh pizza is delivered straight to your door. Domino’s Pizza announced similar ambitions.

In-Game Selling business model

Where previously the game was just a standard product or experience, it is upgraded with a sales channel for other products and services (f.e. pizza delivery). The game actually offers a platform to bring together buyer and sellers, and brings benefits to both, which we know as a brokerage service. Similar to other brokers, game publishers can charge a listing fee to the seller, and/or a commission per transaction. The generic principle here is very valuable: could your existing product or service offer a channel to facilitate specific buy/sell transactions? Which goods or services are your users interested in? Which sellers are interested in your users?

In-Game Selling is a specific example. Any suggestions for a good generic name for this new business model? In-Product Selling, Free+Reseller = Freeseller, In-App Commerce…?