Scrape and sell user data - that's advertising.
Charging a subscription that's healthy to your business but almost unaffordable for many - SaaS
Begging for money - please consider donating (just to fill this up, sorry)
Others ๐ค:
Selling just spaces and not data - that's sponsorship
Just sell or resell- retail
Let others sell (and do nothing) - marketplace
Sell other's products, fully biased - affiliate
In the history of internet these are the models we have been doing so far, very innovative right? I'm super surprised that nearly no industry nor a company has worked on innovating in this area. By far one of the best pricing models I have seen is Duolingo users are not charged but the businesses that need the services.
After brainstorming ๐ง for months now, the closest I could get to benefiting the user and makers is a shared-value-transaction model. And that's why I have taken it here, let's ideate on a model that works really great for the user and to the maker. Ideally, the user is not charged, not sold to and not asked to donate.
Asking for my product? No! This should be something adopted by the wider internet. Let's hack.
Your very sarcastic on current modules, that's not a very good start.
And I think you need to get to some core principles that one can built on.
The issues is the more indirect you make monetisation the more you go down the reward ladder..
Pay is return of value.
So saying you won't pay me means your not valuing it enough or I'm not providing enough value or something in this process doesn't lend itself well to a financial transaction. (things that are considered social actions only, that you are in a way expected as a "good person"..)
There are also modules of "work for service", like where you need to do actions for points to be able to use more. (or sometimes incentivsied ad clicking like common in mobile "idle" games..)
Honesly most of the non-pay alternatives, people put in time in place of money, ads are usually consuming time (like in spotify, youtube, games...), "work for service" is exchange for time.
The free versions of products are often just for the marketing aspects, more people use it, more people know about it, more people tell others about it in multiple ways.
There is differential pay, where people who have more pay more, like common in social free to play games that sell virtual currency and I'd claim many business faces services that put artifical limits on the service and/or charge "per user" and similar. (that's also when you see free for users, but company pay, common in dev services for example)
like moving from charging for a thing to ads reduces the revenues by 100 folds probably. and you need to have crazy masses and/or very specific niches
bussiness modules are mostly social constructs, it's more like discovring an existing one rather than being able to create it.
kickstarting is putting money in the hopes something in the future would exists
there is similar stuff about getting part ownership like virtual equity
There are other similar co-lob paths...
usually people seeking new paths are due to not being able to create enough value, or coming from a non money / capitalastic ideoligy, but that doesn't convert you back to money so you need to segregate yourself out of current systems
like some make up virtual money, before these virtual coins and cryptocurrency, like labour/favor exchange systems.
I think a thing people miss and don't want to admit and want to argue about... is it's easy to create very low value stuff... like duplicates.. like things that are super easy... things that have many alternatives... things that aren't important.. or things that doen't differ much at all for the end result..
if it's just nice to have, but honestly I don't care if it's gone tommorw, you would rightfully have a hard time monitising.
| business models are mostly social constructs, it's more like discovering an existing one rather than being able to create it
This is a great point, and it's a really underrated perspective.
For example, take clothing. The problem is simple: things work out better for humans when their bodies are covered. There are raw materials in the world, and we have labor that can be used to produce clothing of various kinds. How does this happen in practice?
The olden times model would be for your local community to harvest locally-available materials (leather, cotton, etc) and produce clothing. Due to economics, it's easier for some people to specialize in these things. Flash forward a thousand years, and you see that there is a local optimum based on pre-Internet technologies and conventions. We ship American cotton overseas to be processed into jeans, which are then sold wholesale to retailers at <25% of the sticker price (made up in volume) which then can be profitably sold for between 50% and 100% of the sticker price (to pay for the location, advertising, and labor for a direct-to-consumer brand). This is a system that evolved that allowed all parties to be able to sustain themselves while keeping prices low for consumers.
Then you can have some innovations: the fashion industry is an innovation: "what if we optimized for style and scarcity instead of price?" The Internet allowed places like Amazon to redefine the purchase flow from "drive to a mall and look at your 3 favorite stores" to "I'm going to buy something on the first page and trust that I can return it if I can't wear it." Some companies innovate in other parts of the process: vertical integration of supply chains. I think this is the area where the OP is trying to focus: they're really trying to find a shortcut for identifying new social constructs that satisfy the "raw materials to consumers' bodies" problem without really appreciating the number of moving parts in many systems that exist today.
Are you like the genie from the lamp, we talked about shoppify and etsy arrives? :P
Your way better than both of us in words ;)
I'm guessing this is a big part that. oversimplification of what relates to what and what part of a formula is an issue...
I'm not sure scracity is the thing but it doesn't detract from the rest of what your saying
I belive it's more around group identities (and there are stuff to unpack there..)
Possibly Zappos should be credited with that, due I didn't fully research it all for historical accuracy
sorry for hair splitting :bow:
Right.
I get that we pay for the value a product or service brings. But the problem with these premium plans and tons of other models is that I see branding, ads, and shady business practices such as selling our data even on their paid plans. Now, usually when I share something like this other members would ask me to cite sources, while I don't have sources or the time to go find and link them here, I have seen/witnessed this myself.
Privacy policies stating, "we provide your account-based data to third parties to support our services", and paid plans that go like, "free with ads" "premium plan with our branding" "enterprise plan with no branding and no ads"
This is the problem and this is what I'd like to solve, I pay you but still you flood me with your branding and potentially drive a few of my future customers to your brand? One might say, the small branding helps the product company to get some traffic and to provide services at lower costs. Okay, that has exactly bought me to the conclusion that we need to innovate this monetization space. If a company can provide its services without ads, without branding and without selling data to an enterprise customer at the cost of starter and mid-tier customers, then that's a problem for me!! And that needs to be solved! I believe that can be solved by some creation/discovery of a monetization model that benefits both the ends.
If this "pay but still see ads and use my branding" trend continues, one day not-too-far from the future, a huge publisher is gonna publish something saying "premium plan with ads is pretty standard these days many brands have adopted this model" and a swarm of followers are gonna follow the same. I hope to stop that from happening and hence I'm here to find ideas from the smart folks here.
Can you put your problem description as a 10 word thing, I don't get what your trying to achive.
This reads like a consumer complaint on what become a practice most consumers are ok with.
If enough consumers aren't happy with it, a competitor can easily offer an alternative with different practices...
Normally 3rd parties are used as service providers, which is what happens with data with these liberal policies, so if I want to lean more about my data and users I might send it to a linguistic statistical 3rd party services and get results, but I'd have a "service contract" with them, that they don't use the data for other things, and if I can I'd strip the data that's not relevant to the process and identifies... cause it's my interest... there are also policies developing around the world with what is ok and what need notification to the customer and/or control...
For some reason most customers like branded clothing more than clean clothing which I don't agree with buy I buy others.
I'm not sure how the concerns around:
and business modules all related
I'm not a customer/user for any of the services I have in mind. That's why I mentioned we need to work on a plan that benefits the internet and not me.
Yes, when enough customers aren't happy competitors can come in but by that time this particular product has got enough share and made it a "new normal" kinda thing. When you're not happy with a service but you see tons of others using it many will use it anyways than complaining about it.
I bought these ads/data/plans up because businesses are taking the route of showing ads to paid users because they either want more profits or their just premium plan (without ads/branding) isn't sustainable so they had to come up with such practices in the first place. So my guess is (10 words) if we work on a more sustainable model we don't have to end up adopting these models.
I think you missunderstand something, as I started to say in the other post, let's say I'm narcissistic driven by seeing my name [of my bussiness] everywhere, I'll put my name on it.
And if the market is ok with it, it's ok.
it has nothing to do with if it's profitable or not.
If enough people think it's wrong they would make it unprofitable to the point it would disappear (by moving to others that don't do it)
I disagree. Nobody likes crazy-intrusive-flashy ads, read again, I don't mean ads, I'm fine with ads not with these, they still don't seem to disappear. If you think that's ok then I'd say put my affiliate link in the place where the narcissistic brand links out to their website.
you think you deserve more and should get more by your subjective judgment is your entire argument as far as I understand, yet you don't think there is an alternative that provides you more or the difference isn't enough to make you move so your left with writing about how your upset about it?
Like I said...
I'm not looking for alternatives or upset by what a company does because I don't use them or depend on them in any way. Only thought that upsets me is more businesses will buy into these models with lack of innovation in this area. Others might (or might not) feel the same as me, but anyways I'm here to see if we can get to discover/create new models. Plus, I'm not a native English speaker (subjective judgment?) or a writer I may have misunderstood your view many times and you may not get my viewpoint.
There also used to be pay with your computer resources in a way, a few different attempts I think it turns out so much less valuble than ads it dies out.
Think of like the client computer mining crypto as payments..
used to be an idea floting around based on shared resources for website hosting as p2p... so the cost of having the site is actually on system users you could say..
Computer resources cost us and are not scalable but it was quite something when that model was first introduced and had some traction going on until the mining resources were so high that the model became useless.
I'd say we take this crypto mining model or the model of Duolingo, where users complement business services or any other moral monetization models where the users are not charged or given a tier which they can optionally get with extra perks, not-core features so as to realize its value and we build a new model from there?? Products/services should be powered by its heavy users, (the ones really using it), where a significant portion of the revenue generated by them should support lower-tier users (without ads/branding/data) and not the other way around where I pay, I see ads, I lose traffic with your branding, my business looks unprofessional with your branding (but I'm paying?) and you sell pretty good services to your huge enterprise customers...
Which services do you explicitly hate on so much? that do you much bad in your mind? do they have no alternatives for you?...
Intercom, for example, all of their plans are paid but still only on certain plans we can remove their branding that says "we run on intercom" no big deal, it's subtle my question is, why should it even exist in the first place when the customer is paying for it? Yes, there are alternatives but still, my question stays, why should their branding in my brand exist?
cause they want to and you agree (and many other or they wouldn't exist or will be force to adopt)
if they want to put a dickpic there, and people keep buying they agree than it's fine (or at least the total positives outweights the total negatives) than there is no problem
competition exist so people can improve the total offer and might push the others to improve by what people want.
people vote with their $$$
they have competition, but they blossom it means they are doing more good than bad
they piss you off with one thing but not enough for you to dump them and move..
like I don't get how any of these has anything to do with biz modules
seems you want to talk about common biz practices...
I'm not a good writer and I may have not expressed my thoughts well, but I see this as a problem and I don't want other businesses to adopt it and hence I thought on working better models.
It's like I don't like Shopify's transaction model but still have to it as there is nothing else that matches its ease of use. So the thought process goes like, "Mm, if Shopify had a sustainable business why would it charge a % on top of subscription?? If bigcommerce is able to do it why not Shopify, is a subscription not enough? Should we work on better models so businesses don't have to do something like this?" So whether my thought process is flawed or not I guessed it's okay to work on a new model, at what cost tho? If we ideate and arrive at a good one it'd be helpful for us isn't it?
The first step to solve something is a good problem description.
As I've not experienced what you have, I have a hard time extracting the core issue to properly describe it.
Randomly suggesting things without focus... would be hard to hit the issue..
Since I'm not getting it, I'm probably not focusing on the right thing, when you say shopify doing sub+% is bad, I'm thinking they are competing aginst say ebay that charges transaction only (and a subscription to remove the transaction cost almost totally...), with Amazon that has mostly the %, ecommerce carts that let you buy big licences yearly or lifetime (many named something with cart or commerce..) some OSS free as well...
like you've got alternative offers with alternative business modules... do you dislike all of them?...
What would make you happy?