Its a business problem on the web. How do you set up a web business (otherwise known as web 2.0) and collect money for the services you offer? Many do not know how to value their services, and so do not collect any money. They turn to selling online advertisements to keep the business afloat while continuing to develop and offer interesting and innovative services online. Examples are aplenty – all the free e-mail services company such as Yahoo, Google; and the ever growing social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace, to name just the biggest players in this space. There are even portals to help you start your social networking sites, such as Ning.com.
Internet businesses are also making money by charging for premium services on top of their free versions. That’s probably a good way to get people to understand, try and discover the value of the service before committing money to them. This is nothing new. It happened more than 15 years ago with the concept of Shareware – free to use software which you should pay for if you keep using it. Today, internet services ’shareware’ are proliferating. Over and above the software itself, some of these businesses are selling related services, such as increased disk space that the services runs on. Again, this model is not new as many equipment sellers of handphones, printers, etc. are selling parts and accessories to sustain their businesses.
Amidst all these diversity of business models, a company has been set up to help business charge for and collect the money, primarily those on a subscription basis. And its not Paypal. Check out Zuora. While the underlying issues in the subscription service model is not new either, having a one-stop shop to handle the collections is a good idea. Paying people to collect money for you is pretty cool – and I am not referring to the run-of-the-mill debt collectors.
See also: Social networking meets old media: Maybe the ad model can work
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