Web and Mobile Revenue Models

I originally saw this posted on HackerNews and wanted to repost it for those who haven’t seen it. It’s a list of all the current revenue models that exist and examples of companies that use it.

I wanted to create a duplicate of the original, just in-case Hackpad ever went away.

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

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.com