Business Models For Information

aka Business Model for Information/Media

How will anyone make any money from content (want to consider passive content products regardless of whether they are entertaining, professional and actionable, etc.)? Or software (page may need re-naming)? Information Ecosystem Roadmap.

See Intellectual Property, BlogBiz, Micro-Payments, PayWall

For niche/vertical markets

• being the nexus of the content/community cluster has some value
• providing uniquely valuable information has value (most "content" is commodity time-filling edutainment)

If Information Wants To Be Free, where do you get revenue? The typical alternatives (where one gives away content/info as a self-promotional activity) include: Advertising, Sponsorship (Chris Locke says companies should underwrite small cool/relevant sites), selling branded merchandise (e-commerce) (uh, how do you protect this? probably not a big deal if you stay small), selling your time (Consulting, Live Performance), ...?

Affiliate Program sales of related product.

Patronage?

1000 True Fan-s?

Host a Virtual Community?

Found Virginia Postrel interview with Esther Dyson for Reason Magazine (1996). From the business point of view - not to overstate it - Intellectual Property is dead; long live intellectual process. Long live service; long Live Performance. The intellectual assets should be distributed for free, and then you should use them as advertising to charge for speaking, Consulting, for software support--for T-Shirt-s. The Lion King is great advertising for T-shirts, baseball caps, lunch boxes. To me Java (software) is advertising for Sun Microsystems. And my newsletter... If you meet me at a conference, I'll give it to you for free. But if you want a steady supply, a subscription, I will charge you $600. Again, you give it away once or twice for free to hook them on the serial, on the subscription, on the membership. But people are much less likely to pay for one copy. They will pay for a stream, for a performance, an experience.