All posts tagged ‘business model’
by Mike Masnick, Blogger, Techdirt
This certainly isn’t the first time it’s been proposed, but it appears that the RIAA is potentially warming up to the idea of a “music surcharge” that would have ISPs pay $5 a month in order to allow anyone to share music online. Just a month ago, we were discussing why this is a bad idea. First, it’s effectively treating everyone as a criminal and forcing those who don’t download or share music to subsidize everyone who does. Second, and much more importantly, it’s not necessary. If there’s anything that the past five years (and the past year especially) have taught us, it’s that there are many different ways for musicians to make money without requiring the government to step in and set up a business model for them. In other words, there’s no compelling need for such a mandated system. Third, once you do this, it opens up additional questions from other industries. Will the government need to set up laws that prop up their business models as well?
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by Alana Semuels, Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times
With about 300 million page views a day, Wikipedia by some estimates could be worth many hundreds of millions of dollars if it sold advertising space. It doesn’t. Wikipedia’s business plan is, basically, to hold out a tin cup whenever it runs low on funds, which is very often. When it comes to money, “we are about as unsophisticated as we could possibly be,” Executive Director Sue Gardner said as she swept up Styrofoam packing nuts in the office in San Francisco, the foundation’s home since it relocated in January from St. Petersburg, Fla. “It’s time for us to grow up a little bit.”
Growing up can be hard to do.
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by Jackson West, Blogger, NewTeeVee
Now that Revver has been sold to LiveUniverse, and LiveVideo has been officially launched, what’s the future for Revver’s business model? After all, it was just a few months ago that Revver revealed they’d paid $1 million to content creators since opening their doors to the public.
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by Mathew Ingram, Blogger, mathewingram.com/work
I know it’s kind of quaint to wonder about business models with Web 2.0 companies, and a number of people (including Fred Wilson) have argued that start-ups shouldn’t worry about monetization until they get some scale, but I have to say that I felt that old twinge of concern when I first saw Scribd, which just relaunched with a new format and features, including its own Flash-based document viewer. I think the service is great, but the business angle kind of makes me wonder.
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by Allen Stern, Editor, CenterNetworks.com
The question of business-model timing seems to come up weekly with regards to some start-up. As Twitter usage has grown, have they f’ed themselves out of a real, sustainable business model? And has Pownce done something right by launching with a business model? Personally I prefer that a start-up come out of the gate with a business model–perhaps it’s the accountant in me.
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