Internet & media, Non-profit & public

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Many online content providers are struggling with their online business model. Nothing new of course. The same goes up for the scientific publishers. In contrast with the news industry where an off-line publication (newspaper) has a rather low price tag, scientific publications are valued at a much higher price. Therefore many of these publications are today locked behind webshops and not accessible to the public. Often the abstract doesn’t give enough information to convince people to buy the full article. DeepDyve tries to offer a solution for that. The scientific search engine now offers the possibility to rent full articles for 24 hours for only $ 0.99. The articles will be accessible online in a not distributable and printable format, at least that is what they are claiming. A part of the revenue will be shared to the scientific publishers.

The business model itself is not that unique. This is again a layered freemium model. Part of the content is accessible for free (abstract/summary) and people can pay to have access to more information. When articles are very long and on top of that complex to read, the 24 hour time frame will probably be not enough for most users. Renting more days or buying the article will often be a better choice. The difference with other micro-payment services is that the small $0.99 teasers are not the only revenue stream for the company. This is only a step-up to convince people to buy full articles. In contrast with news, scientific articles remain valuable over time what makes it more interesting to buy the articles instead of ‘renting’ them.

Other-industries

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The new start-up Irehab.com tries to take a different approach to health care. Patients can get free advice on how to treat specific complaints. By answering a few questions and looking at several 3D animations, these users should be able to diagnose themselves. To treat for instance ‘back pain’ they can follow step-by-step instruction videos made by physical therapists but personally selected by external doctors to fit the needs of that specific patient. The first 10 consults are free of charge, both for the patient and the doctor. On the platform itself, they will have a private area where they can keep track of the results. After the first 10 consults the doctors will have to pay $0.99 for each patient that they want to follow up in the future. For further advice the patient will have to pay a fixed nominal fee per month directly to the clinic or doctor. On average this fee will be around $9.99. The only money that Irehab.com” receives will be the $0.99 per month, so they will need a large database to make this Freemium concept profitable. Within a few years it will be common practice that people will diagnose and monitor themselves without the hassle of expensive expert consults. Many companies are looking for ways to monetize this evolution. Google Health and Microsoft HealthVault are only a few of the large group IT services that are around these days. But also beyond the normal web experience we see these experimental concepts. Recently Apple presented the Lifescan’s New Diabetes iPhone App that communicates with a seperate glucose monitoring device. The latter works similar as the VirtuaGym concept we presented earlier. There people could monitor their offline exercise habits to benchmark these with other peers online. This D.I.Y. health care market is nearly unexplored so you may expect a boom of new concepts and ideas in the coming year. Many of them will fail but some of them will change the way we look at health care forever.

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?

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.

Banking & professional services, Internet & media

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Today, European internet entrepreneurs, investors and bloggers gathered on the Plugg 2009 conference to look at the ‘new web’ and its future. One of the key elements on Plugg is the Start-ups Rally, a pitching competition where 20 start-ups present their business to the audience and a challenging jury of investors and thought leaders. Let’s have a look at the business model of the 2 winners!

Mendeley.com: Last.fm for research

The overall winner was Mendeley.com (congratulations!). Mendeley positions itself as a “Last.fm for research”. They offer a free social application for managing and sharing research papers, in combination with a web 2.0 site for discovering research trends and connecting to like-minded academics. Mendeley is a typical example of a free business model (subcategory: Freemium). When you sign up, the social app and service are completely free. While the existing features will always remain free, Mendeley plans to introduce new features in the future and make them available to premium users for a fee. Conclusion… Free + Premium = Freemium business model.

Myngle.com: The new way to learn languages

The crowds’ favorite at Plugg 2009 was the new study platform Myngle.com. This online platform offers a relative new way to learn languages by bringing together teachers and students from all over the world. Looking in our database of business models, you see that Myngle relies on a typical Broker model similar to eBay or Zopa: bringing a traditional business to the online mass market. The students pay a fixed price per lesson to a teacher. Myngle charges 18% commission on the transactions.

As such, Myngle brings a successful, existing online business model into a new market. Other start-ups like LiveMocha and Linkua offer similar services, but Myngle differentiates itself by asking students to pay 300-400 EUR upfront for lessons to ensure continuity of taking lessons (not stop after 1 lesson). Myngle has a revenue stream of 20,000 EUR per month growing steadily.