How does XYZ.com make money? This is one of the most common questions asked around on sites like Quora and forums.
I found a great list of models that i wanted to share with you guys, thanks to the awesome community at HackPad. Follow the original thread here.
Advertising
- Display Ads – ex. Yahoo!
- Search Ads – ex. Google
- Text Ads – ex. Google
- Video Ads – ex. Hulu
- Audio Ads – ex. Pandora
- Promoted Content – ex. Twitter, Tumblr
- Paid content links – ex. Outbrain
- Recruitment Ads – ex. LinkedIn
- Lead Generation – ex. MoneySuperMarket, ZocDoc
- Affiliate Fees – ex. Amazon Affiliate Program
- Classifieds – ex. Craiglist
- Featured listings – e.g. Yelp, Super Pages;
- Email Ads – as done by Yahoo, MSN
- Ad Retargeting – ex. Criteo
- Real-time Intent Ad Delivery
- Location-based offers – ex/ Foursquare
- Sponsorships / Site Takeovers – ex. Pandora
Commerce
- Retailing – ex. Zappos
- Marketplace – ex. Etsy
- Crowdsourced Marketplace – ex. Threadless
- Excess Capacity Markets – Uber, AirBnB
- Vertically Integrated Commerce – ex. Warby Parker
- Aggregator – ex. Lastminute.com
- Flash Sales: Gilt Groupe, Vente Privee
- Group buying – ex. Groupon
- Digital goods / downloads – ex. iTunes
- Virtual goods – ex. Zynga
- Training – ex. Cloudera (??), -> Coursera
- Pay what you want – ex. Radiohead
- Commission – ex. SharesPost
- Commission per order – ex. Seamless, GrubHub
- Auction – ex. eBay
- Reverse Auction – ex Priceline
- Barter for services ex. SwapRight
Subscription
- Software as a Service (SAAS) – ex. Salesforce
- Service as a Service – ex. Shopify
- Content as a Service – ex: Spotify, Netflix
- Infrastructure/Platform As A Service – ex. AWS
- Freemium SAAS – ex. Dropbox
- Donations – ex. Wikipedia
- Sampling – ex Birchbox
- Membership Services – ex Amazon Prime
- Support and Maintenance – ex 10gen, Red Hat
- Paywall – ex. NYTimes
- Voice and video-conferencing – ex. Uberconference
Peer to Peer
- Peer-to-Peer Lending – ex. Lending Club,
- Peer-to-Peer Gambling – ex. BetFair
- Peer-to-peer buying – ex Etsy
- Peer-to-peer insurance/home/car – ex (??)
- Peer-to-peer computing (CrasPlan storage, or SETI@home)
- Peer-to-peer service – ex. Mechanical Turk, TaskRabbit
- Peer-to-peer Mobile WiFi/Tethering – ex (??)
Transaction processing
- Merchant Acquiring – ex. PayPal (Online / Offline), Stripe (Online), Square (Offline)
- Intermediary – ex. IP Commerce (POS 2.0), CardSpring
- Acquiring Processing – ex. Paymentech
- Bank Transfer – ex. Dwolla
- Bank Depository Offering – ex. Simple, Movenbank (spread on average deposits)
- Bank Card Issuance – ex. Simple (interchange fee per transaction)
- Fullfilment – ex. Amazon
- Messaging – ex. Peer-to-Peer SMS, IM, Group Messaging
- Telephony – ex. termination/origination in public telephony networks (skype out/in)
- Telephony – ex. termination/origination within private telephony cloud (e.g. native skype)
- Payment Gateways: Mobile -ex. Braintree
- Platform Monetization (“Tax”) – Facebook Credits; iO6 30% cut.
Licensing
- Per Seat License – ex. Sencha
- Per Device/Server License – ex. QlikView
- Per Application instance – ex. Adobe Photoshop
- Per Site License – ex. Private cloud on internal infrastructure
- Patent Licensing – ex. Qualcomm
- Brand Licensing – ex. Sesame Street
- Indirect Licensing – ex. Apple Volume Purchasing
Data
- User data – ex. BlueKai
- Business data – ex. Duedil
- User intelligence – ex. Yougov
- Search Data – ex. Chango
- Real-time Consumer Intent Data – ex. Yieldbot
- Benchmarking services – ex. Comscore
- Market research – ex. GLG
Mobile
- Paid App Downloads – ex. WhatsApp
- In-app purchases – ex. Zynga Poker
- In-app subscriptions – ex. NY Times app
- Advertising – ex. Flurry, AdMob
- Digital-to-physical – ex. Red Stamp, Postagram
- Transactions – ex Hailo
Gaming
- Freemium – Free to play w/ virtual currency – ex. Zynga
- Subscription- ex. World of Warcraft
- Premium – ex. xBox games
- DLC – (Downloadable Content) – ex. Call of Duty
- Ad Supported – ex – addictinggames.co
Do share with us what you feel about these revenue models and also if i missed out on anything in the comments below.
