DeepDyve, renting scientific articles

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.

Posted on November 2, 2009 in Internet & media, Non-profit & public Read more

Irehab.com: Let doctors pay to give you health care

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. irehab.com give personal online health careWithin 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.

Posted on August 17, 2009 in Other-industries Read more

Super Chirp Launches Freemium Twitter Model

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 [...]

Posted on June 8, 2009 in Internet & media Read more

Pitcharena.com: How to make money online via social apps? 2/4

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 [...]

Posted on May 26, 2009 in Internet & media Read more