Attended an extraordinary student e-marketing presentation where the business models and marketing strategies of leading social networks and online startups in both China and the United States were analyzed and dissected.
It is interesting to note that advertising and freemium business models dominate among social media companies and online startups in both China and the United States. This is the predominant revenue source for most of these companies. This highlight the extreme difficultly of generating revenues through charging for content or membership fees in the online world where information is still seen as free. For each exclusive membership site, there are multiple other sites that offer the same information for free, making it extremely difficult for content membership sites to gain market share and build up a large enough audience. Only the very premium or prestigious content provider can charge membership or subscription fees and often only for exclusive contents while most of the articles are provided for free. A potential future business model, is to charge a negligible fee for each use or access while depending on volume of users to drive revenues. A small almost negligible fee is likely to be more acceptable to online users compared to an annual or monthly membership fee.
The challenge is a technical one...how do we create an industry standard small payments system that can handle these teeny transactions. Can Paypal fill that role?
ReplyDeleteBtw glad you liked the NetTools presentations. I learn something new each year.
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