Monetization

2005-01 UPDATE - Market Snapshots of the WEB

January 2005. The reference search engine GuruNet ("facts on demand") has abandoned its subscription business model in favor of a free service supported by contextual ads such as from Google and Overture. The new service is answers.com.
-source: GuruNet

COMMENT 2005-01. The company views the move as a judgment less about the merits of the two monetization models, and more about the nature of the GuruNet service, and how best to grow its user base. With many alternative reference sources available often for free, subscription was becoming a too restraining model.

The new service is highly rated by reviewers (and we recommend it as a research tool), and provides clustered and distilled results far different from the return of page snippets in standard search. A toolbar is available. (And we just noticed Google's "definition" link to a dictionary for the search term used now points to answers.com)
reference search at answers.com...

2004-09 UPDATE - Market Snapshots of the WEB

September 2004. Thomas Register, which early created an online version of its directory service at what is now ThomasNet.com, partnered with FindWhat in March to found ThomasB2B, which this month launches its global online advertising network.

The system features pay-per-click advertising across its 10,000 product categories, to facilitate commercial transactions between buyers and sellers worldwide, and delivers ads on an increasing number of sites around the world.
-source: ThomasB2B

2003-09 UPDATE - Market Snapshots of the WEB

September 2003. US consumers spent $748 million on online content during the first half of 2003, representing a 23 percent increase over the same period in 2002. The leading categories of content in order are:

Personals/Dating
Business/Investment
Entertainment/Lifestyle
Research
Community-made Directories
Personal Growth
General News
Games
Credit Help
Greeting Cards
Sports
-source: comScore / Online Publishers Association

2003-07 UPDATE - Market Snapshots of the WEB

July 2003. Micropayments using the existing payment infrastructure (credit card, PayPal, etc) are the key to monetizing unique content on websites. The success of Apple's music downloads venture is leading the way for other industries - notably sports analysis and statistics - to charge for bite-size pieces of Web content. Price points per item of specific content are still evolving, but payments of ninety-nine cents, or $2.50, for example, are considered the easy range to begin charging for content.
-source: internetnews.com

COMMENT 2003-07. All surveys continue to show strong, declared resistance to paying for online content, and yet it's beginning to happen, and Apple's test of the music market will add to the numbers (broadband of course makes a big difference in the pattern). Information, if sufficiently unique, or branded, can be a product just like any other.

As Internet culture changes to reflect this, and as payment technologies continue to improve, and as intellectual property protections gain substance, the market of paid content becomes revealed as the great untapped margin lying somewhere between Internet-As-Global-Library and Internet-As-Shopping-Mall. Website owners should stay alert to content opportunities.

2003-03 UPDATE - Market Snapshots of the WEB

March 2003. Consumer spending on paid content in 2003 will increase 30 percent from 2002, to $2 billion. Revenues will grow at a 20% annual rate until 2007. Even so, most online media houses will gather more than 60% of revenues from advertising for the next two years.
-source: Jupiter Research

March 2003. The paid content market nearly doubled in 2002 from 2001, although there was a slowing in Q4. Even so, 2002 proved finally that users would pay for content, contrary to long-standing belief. The top Web destinations by consumer-content revenue, in order of rank are:

yahoo.com
match.com
real.com
classmates.com
wsj.com,
weightwatchers.com, a
ancestry.com
consumerinfo.com
matchmaker.com
1800ussearch.com
consumerreports.org
espn.go.com
carfax.com
thestreet.com
bluemountain.com
playboy.com
kiss.com
msn.com
egreetings.com
ieee.org
arttoday.com
pressplay.com
britannica.com
astrology.com
smartmoney.com
-source: Online Publishers Association, comScore Networks

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