Comprehensive List of Web And Mobile Revenue Models

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. 

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.