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According to Genís Roca1, Web 2.0 is a social movement before an enterprise model, and therefore the difficulty in identifying the underlying model of business (since in many occasions there are no models).
Web 2.0 is full of proposals that can generate revenues, but that were born with the only intention to solve a personal necessity. These proposals can be outlined in three types of initiatives that respond to personal motivations, that in spite of not having connections among them, it’s sure that some projects follow them as if they were an evolutionary scale.
1.1. Initiatives without expectation of economic revenue
It is the majority case in the 2.0 ecosystem. The personal initiative without economic expectations is the underlying motivation in the great majority of blogs, and also it is in the origin of many of mash-ups that populate the network. The new Internet makes possible that any person takes the initiative creating and disclosing content and applications, and it can practically do it without costs except the time that one is going to dedicate to the development of that content or application, and there are so many reasons different from the money that can justify that somebody destines a part of its time to something.
1.2. Initiatives centered around the person, with expectation of economic revenue
In some cases the previous initiatives, developed without economic expectations, contribute to visibility and recognition to their authors. When that happens exists the possibility of continuing ahead with the initiative mantaining and promoting that social relevance, since it tolerates new opportunities that have economic repercussions: conferences, consultancies, jobs… The initiative goes on without contributing direct economic benefits, but the capitalization of the effort is shaped in the personal activity of the promoter, who sees increase in his wage as freelance or employee.
Oscar Manzano, who owns and mantains the A bit of an apple2 blog, Emilio Arias of Todo BI3 and Tic616 creator of Tic & Tac4, devised a list of profiles5 from the Open Source software model of business that, slightly adapted, can be useful to exemplify the different profiles that can arise when one decides to get economic revenues from a personal initiative (one can assume different profiles at the same time):
- Apostles or evangelists
They are also called A-list. Their work has deserved them a widespread interest and they have become gurus that create opinion. They can be subject to fashions and they have a possible model of business in participation to conferences, publication of books, participation in radio programs, similar collaboration in press and magazines, and other activities. - Technicians
They are those that offer their experience and talent to the others. They have a good technical knowledge and they can solve the necessities of people as much as companies. Probably the most habitual activity for them is to help to improve and to personalize the aspects of blogs or the code of new mash-ups, an activity that occupies numerous technicians and will eventually lead to the creation of a service enterprise.
A third habitual activity is the understanding of the motivations of bloggers, an activity needed by politicians and the people in charge of advertising campaigns. - Producers
They are those that develop a product/service and instead of profiting licensing it, they get revenues from positioning themselves as the best connoisseurs of it, which gives them such a relevance in the market that let them to start up strategies that can take advantage of this position. - Support suppliers
Expert connoisseurs of a product/service, they specialize in giving support to the users of this product/service. The most habitual case at the moment is represented by experts who know how to improve the effectiveness of the announcements in Internet, or the position in the results of a search engine. They are the denominated SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and know tactics, tricks and strategies to improve the results in Yahoo! or Google (for example) searches. - Trainers
Expert connoisseurs of a product/service, they develop teaching activities for the new users of this product/service. There are many examples of this profile, and a habitual example is represented by seminaries of introduction to the concepts of Web 2.0.
We can now take a look at another possible strategies centered around this profiles. We can take a look at the five point that Ross Mayfield6 proposed as a strategy for the adoption of social software in a company, and that can be useful to Web 2.0 services as well.
- Identify key user groups
- Identify and understand key users
- Convert key users into evangelists
- Turn evangelists into trainers
- Support bottom-up adoption and emergent behaviours
1.3. Initiatives centered around a project, with expectation of economic revenue
There are people who undertake initiatives in a personal direction, without integrating themselves in an organization, and they make it with the desire to obtain some economic return. They are not interested solely in the social service they can offer, or the return in prestige they can get, but they are interested in some direct economic revenues. In some cases they simply look for a model of business that can improve the economic sustainability of the project, whereas in others they look for a revenue that can improve their personal economic situation.
The simplest and obvious way to begin to obtain economic income is by means of the inclusion of publicity although this one will be a hardly symbolic solution unless it counts on a quite significant audience and visibility. And it is difficult to explore other formulas of business resisting the idea of constituting a company and maintaining the personal character of the project.
In such a situation thus there can be only one solution profitable to the promoter of the project: to sell it to a bigger company (a solution adopted by many Web 1.0 entrepreneurs and that ended at the outbreak of the speculative bubble, since some of the ideas which they sold were absolutely nonviable).
If the entrepreneur wants to offer his project it can be useful to adopt some of the strategies that have followed by those that has already managed to sell his blog with success, some of which have been analyzed by Clive Thompson in an article published in New York Magazine7.
- The accidental tourist
Someone who starts single, has talent and is driven by circumstances difficult to reproduce. - The record-label approach
It consists of creating a great number of very diverse projects, each one of them laying for a direction or determined subject, to see which of them gives more probabilities of success.(to be continued)
- (2007) Roca G., Contexto económico-empresarial, in (2007) Encinar J., Fumero A., Roca G., Web 2.0, Fundación Orange España, Madrid [↸]
- http://www.abitofanapple.com/ [↸]
- http://todobi.blogspot.com/ [↸]
- http://tikitak.blogspot.com/ [↸]
- http://applebit.wordpress.com/2005/12/27/open-source-in-a-collaborative-way/ [↸]
- (2006) Mayfield, R., “An Adoption Strategy for Social Software in the Enterprise”, http://www.socialtext.com/node/70 [↸]
- Clive Thompson, “Blogs to Riches. The Haves and Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom”, New York Magazine, 20/02/2006, http://nymag.com/news/media/15967/index.html [↸]
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