Topic 5 - Business Model

1) Take a few notes and provide some examples of businesses which fit the models below.

• Infomediary: The word infomediary is formed from a combination of the words information and intermediary. An infomediary is a Web Site that gathers and organizes large amounts of data and acts as an intermediary between those who want the information and those who supply the information. There are two types of infomediaries. Some infomediaries, such as Autobytel.com and BizRate.com, offer consumers a place to gather information about specific products and companies before they make purchasing decisions. The infomediary is a neutral entity, a third-party provider of unbiased information; it does not promote or try to sell specific products in preference over other products. It does not act on behalf of any vendors. The second type of infomediary, and one that is not necessarily Web-based, is one that provides vendors with consumer information that will help the vendor develop and market products. The infomediary collects the personal information from the buyers and markets that data to businesses. The advantage of this approach is that consumer privacy is protected and some infomediaries even offer consumers a percentage of the brokerage deals.

• Affiliate: The affiliate model provides purchase opportunities wherever people may be surfing. It does this by offering financial incentives (in the form of a percentage of revenue) to affiliated partner sites. The affiliates provide purchase-point click-through to the merchant. It is a pay-for-performance model: if an affiliate does not generate sales, it represents no cost to the merchant. The affiliate model is inherently well-suited to the web, which explains its popularity. Variations include banner exchange, pay-per-click, and revenue sharing programs. An example of this is Amazon.com.

• Subscription: The basic notion here is that the customer is charged a periodic fee for a goods or service. Subscription is a very important facet of the internet, because we’re seeing more and more things which were formerly products, things that were sold to the customer as a product – and in particular in the area of software, like various applications sold as products installed on your computer – are now starting to transition quite rapidly to services. The fees charged for subscriptions are also set, regardless of the usage. With this type of business model providers are able to trace potential grow and decline of the subscription model as with the fixed price they are guaranteed a certain amount of revenue. There are five successful models for subscription website topic selection. These include: Existing newsletter topics,Trade association, Career advancement, Personality based/insider tips, Downloadable product library.

• Utility: The utility business model is based on a metering or pay-as-you-go approach. This is broken up into two categories. The first is metered usage which measures and bills users based on actual usage of a service. The second is metered subscriptions which allows subscribers to purchase access to content in metered portions (e.g., numbers of pages viewed). An example of this is Slashdot. 

2) What is the business model for TWITTER?

The business model for TWITTER would be the community model with the social networking services.

3)How does Australia rate ?

• What is the Mobile phone use /100 population - compare Australia, USA, China, India, Your Country ?

Australia: 113.8

USA: 90.8

China: 116.7

India: 43.8

France: 95.5

• Internet use / 100 population - compare Australia, USA, China, India, Your Country

Australia: 74.3

USA: 78.0

China: 28.9

India: 5.1

France: 71.6

• Compare main strengths and weaknesses of Australia or your home country in the survey

Strenghts: Political and regulatory environment (5.6), Infrastructure environment (5.1) and Individual readiness (5.1).

Weaknesses: Business usage (4.4), Government readiness (4.6) and Market environment (4.7).

By looking at the survey in all categories, France is good if we take the scale from 1 to 7. The country is generally situated in the average, around 5.

• What does the survey suggest to you about the Information Technology readiness of Australian business compared to Australian consumers?

Information Technology readiness of Australian business is ranked lower in the world at 22 compared with Information Technology readiness of Australian consumers who rank 16 in the world. This suggests that Australian businesses are not as Information Technology ready as Australian consumers.