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Education 2.0 Business Models

There's a SocialLearn steering group meeting next week, and as part of the document preparation for it Martin has tried to get us thinking about potential business models;-)

So to try and get myself in the zone for mulling such things over on a dog walk, here's a list of models off the top of my head...

Advertising models

• CPM (cost-per-thousand) ad impressions (banners, text ads, etc. etc)
• PPC (pay-per-click ads - maybe via e.g. Google Adsense)
• PPA (pay-per-action)

Ads can be run as a 3rd party publisher (e.g. via Adsense) or by selling ad space/inventory (cf. sponsorship).

Sponsorship
To my mind, this is ad-selling as much as anything... The difficult part is getting the ad-inventory/sponsorship.

Affiliate deals (cf. PPA)

• Books (e.g Amazon affiliates; cf. the OpenLearn_daily aStore);
• Jobs/recruitment (e.g. ?)
• Courses (e.g. ?learndirect)
  

Upselling/subscription
Offer a free basic service then upsell. Ideally, users should even be able to play with some of the apps without registering, but before they can do something really useful, they then need to register (i.e. a lazy registration design pattern).

Transaction Fees (B2B)
e.g. make businesses pay for bulk operations over the platform. If the platform acts as an aggregator, it may be that the platform also pays a commission feed to data orginators as a license condition of aggregating their data?

Pay-for-access/Licensing
e.g. charge businesses who generate business on you platform; e.g. levy a license fee if they build apps that use your platform; metered access for users and/or generators of traffic? (so e.g. if you build an app that makes frequent demands of my API, I'm gonna charge you for it (maybe Twitter should do this - let other people monetise at a B2C level and charge the app builders for client access to the API at metered or bulk B2B rates?)

Data Vending & Data Related Value Add Services

• data mining aggregated data and selling the insights?
• recommendation services (e.g. people who X'd also Y'd);
• selling on recommendations (lead generation, selling people's contact info in particular demographics etc)
  

Also related to business models, maybe, are the questions of 'recruitment and retention'. Word-of-mouth personal recommendations at scale is probably one of the most effective ways of building users (as opposed to just traffic), so maybe we need some features that accommodate a 'viral growth sharing design pattern'? e.g. user invites for participating in collaborative activities (though again maybe with lazy registration?)

A quick google also turns up the following:

"Web 2.0 Business models (Technosight)" refers to the following diagram, which is maybe also worth mulling over:

Hmm - how encouraging is it that I'm where Dion was more than 2.0 years ago?! ;-) Struggling to Monetize Web 2.0...

See also "When dot com becomes dot edu".

Now where's the dog... ;-)

PS a couple more refinements are listed here: Beyond AdSense: A Business Model Checklist.

This slideshow is also interesting...

PPS another list of models: The Long Tail Of Business Models

Tags: web2.0, business models, s:l, socialearn, sociallearn, we've changed the name again - double L again now I think

Posted by ajh59 at May 26, 2008 05:57 PM