Web Business Model | Freemium Business Model

Freemium Business Model

Popular "WEB" Business Models

Fooling around I landed on this great article  about "web business model options". For working reason I'm investigating this topic and this article was one of the best I could find...

Below you find the "juice" of the article.

....going through the Webware 100 Top Web Apps for 2008, analysing the business model(s) used by each. The chart below shows the results of this survey: 34% use Advertising, 12% a Variable Subscription model, and 8% each for Virtual Products (typically digital downloads), Related Products (typically a large software company offering a free product to attract you to their platform) and Pay-Per-Use.

So, with no surprise, advertising is the "king" of this model. The interesting thing in the article can be seen on the cake graph below:

model_survey.jpg

LEGEND: I.*.*. Immediate Revenue  --- L.*.*. Long-Term Revenue

What caught my attention was that the the smallest part is the one related to long term revenue! Some of the actual (March 2009) and most used web application, like "youtube, facebook, twitter and so on..." are on that part. So the question is how can be a long term business model sustainable in a so fast enviroment, like web?

Only with a great amount of resources / money! And the needings for resources will grow in the future so some services are going to die before they can monetize, here an example: www.profilactic.com.

Another one should have been Twitter, but they found money and they plan to get some more too. But that is another story!

I think that in the future we will have very few web-services that will survive to the long term revenue and the success web business model is the immediate revenue one, expecially the one based on the "freemium" mode where you can monetize fast a service that will survive few years, since new and better ones will arrive soon.

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27 Mar 09

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