BizOrigin

Chris Anderson, Fred Wilson and Dave McClure have created a great list of Web business models. The list includes:

• E-commerce
• CPM ads
• CPC ads
• CPT ads
• Lead generation
• Subscription revenues
• Affiliate revenues (think: Amazon Associates)
• Rental of subscriber lists
• Sale of information (selling data about users–aggregate/statistical or individual)
• Licensing of brand (people pay to use a media brand as implied endorsement)
• Licensing of content (syndication)
• Getting the users to create something of value for free and applying any of the above to monetize it. (Like Digg)
• Upgraded service/content
• Alternate output (print/print-on-demand, t-shirts, etc)
• Custom services (installation, support services)
• Live events
• Souvenirs/”Merchandise”
• Co-branded spinoff
• Cost Per Install (popular with top Facebook apps)
• Sponsorships
• Listings
• Paid Inclusion
• Multimedia ads (video ads)
• API Fees (charging third parties to access your API, like Alexa)
• FeedSense
• FeedSearch
• FanPageApps

To this, I have a few more to add:

(i) Donations. Several sites that I visit frequently, do not charge for the services/software they provide, but rely on donations from the user base. Many of the torrent sites follow this model as well.

(ii) Domain name value appreciation. This is a modern version of Sears, where the operation of the company lost money but the real estate owned by company appreciated significantly. Example - spark.com; the site lay dormant for a long time but the domain name appreciated in value. Spark Networks, a collection of dating site, purchased it in 2004; I know because I negotiated the deal for the purchase of spark.com and worked with Spark Networks on the IP side of their re-branding strategy.

(iii) Ad exchange credits. I haven’t seen this used recently, but this method involves showing ads from an ad-exchange and accumulating reciprocal ad credits, which can be sold to third party.

(iv) Sale of traffic. Example - BlogOhBlog.com gave away free wordpress themes for about 6 months with very limited monetization. At the end of the 6 month period, it had 100k visitors/month and the domain name BlogOhBlog.com was sold for $10k.

I am sure there are others. Please leave a comment here or at Fred’s blog if you would like to add it to the growing list.